‘Confession’ takes a stab at the dark side of getting it off your chest

Keisuke Asai (Toma Ikuta) and Ryu Ji-yong (Yang Ik-june) are old college friends on an annual pilgrimage to the mountain where their hiking buddy, Sayuri (the single-named Nao), disappeared 16 years earlier. When they get caught in a snowstorm and Ji-yong sustains a serious leg injury, he makes what he presumes will be a deathbed confession, admitting that he murdered the woman they’ve been mourning for all these years.

But wait! The blizzard subsides to reveal a mountain lodge nearby, and Keisuke drags his companion to safety. With no prospect of outside help coming anytime soon, they hunker down for what looks set to be a long night. Further complicating matters, Ji-yong is already showing signs of confessor’s remorse, while Keisuke struggles with a debilitating case of altitude sickness.

The two men quickly move from tense, paranoid exchanges to a rough-and-tumble game of cat-and-mouse, in which Yang also acts circles around his prey. Ikuta gives the kind of over-expressive performance that tends to play better in TV dramas, but his South Korean counterpart’s seething intensity comes from a deeper — and darker — place.

Yang's character was Japanese in the 1998 manga by Nobuyuki Fukumoto (“Kaiji”) and Kaiji Kawaguchi (“The Silent Service”) on which the film is based. Switching his nationality was an inspired move, giving a racial tinge to the duo’s face-off. The film would be considerably less interesting without Yang, who’s appeared in several other Japanese movies, but is best known for the searing Korean-language drama “Breathless” (2009), which he also directed.

Once the two men drop all pretense of decency and start trying to hack chunks out of each other, there isn’t much option except to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita, who’s more associated with slacker comedies than violent genre fare, stages the film’s action sequences with considerable enthusiasm (and some superior make-up effects). He has spoken of his love for Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” which should give some indication of the macabre pleasures that await. My personal favorite was the moment when Ji-yong takes a seemingly fatal tumble down a flight of stairs, then snaps his broken neck back into place.

In an era of bloated runtimes, “Confession” is refreshingly lean: It clocks in at just 74 minutes, a decent chunk of which is accounted for by the grindingly awful Maximum The Hormone song that plays over the end credits. Shuji Yuki and Ryo Takada’s screenplay wastes little time setting up the premise, while giving only the barest information about the two leads.

Other aspects of the film’s construction aren’t quite so taut. Sayuri’s death gets replayed so incessantly, I started to suspect that Nao had a clause in her contract stipulating a certain amount of screen time. More damagingly, “Confession” signals too early — and too obviously — that everything isn’t quite as it seems. The glaring inconsistencies are eventually explained, in a manner of speaking, but they diminish any sense of suspense.

Although the film has a few more secrets to divulge, the excitement lies more in discovering how badly things will end for its protagonists — and in this respect, “Confession” doesn’t disappoint. Yamashita has made a B-movie in the purest sense: quick, sick and disposable.