‘Sham’ flirts with ambiguity, then picks a side

Go Ayano seldom seems more content than when he’s playing thoroughly broken men. He’s given an especially choice assignment in Takashi Miike’s “Sham,” in which he portrays an elementary school teacher who gets subjected to an ordeal worthy of Franz Kafka.

Seiichi Yabushita (Ayano) is suspended from his job and then taken to court for allegedly bullying a 9-year-old student, Takuto (Kira Miura), and pushing him to attempt suicide. The boy’s mother, Ritsuko (Ko Shibasaki), claims that the abuse left her son suffering from PTSD. Unsatisfied with the school’s handling of the case, she takes the story to a tabloid hack, Michihiko Narumi (Kazuya Kamenashi), who publishes a sensationalized account that reveals Seiichi’s identity and brands him a “killer teacher.”

Forced by his spineless superiors to make a public apology, Seiichi finds himself vilified and facing a civil lawsuit for ¥58 million in damages, waged by Ritsuko and a mind-boggling 550-strong legal team. In his corner is Toshio Yugamidani, the only lawyer who is willing to take his case — played with rumpled, Columbo-style charm by Kaoru Kobayashi. The odds are stacked against them, but you can probably guess how this is all going to play out.

The film is based on a real-life incident from 2003 that received considerable attention at the time, not least because the alleged bullying was claimed to be racially motivated. This makes it unusual territory for Miike, a filmmaker whose tastes tend toward operatic excess rather than realism. Working from a 2007 nonfiction book by journalist Masumi Fukuda (adapted by screenwriter Hayashi Mori), the director keeps his wilder impulses mostly in check, though there are still a few moments of heightened melodrama.

“Sham” could have been a solid, if overwrought, legal drama, but it makes the mistake of teasing something far more interesting during its first half. In the manner of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Monster” (2023), we’re presented with two competing versions of events, told from Ritsuko’s and Seiichi’s points of view. In the first, the teacher is a twitchy, dead-eyed psychopath and Takuto a blameless innocent. Seiichi’s account portrays himself as a bland but decent guy trying to deal with a problem student, while Ritsuko becomes an icy and inscrutable antagonist, not so far from the avenging angel played by Eihi Shiina in Miike’s international breakout, “Audition” (1999).

The problems arise when the film quietly ditches this he-said-she-said format and plants its sympathies squarely with the defendant, without making any effort to reconcile the differences between the two accounts. The crude characterizations of Seiichi’s opponents make sense when they’re being seen from his perspective; once that ceases to be the case, the one-dimensional portrayals start to look lazy and incurious. Although a flashback to Ritsuko’s childhood purports to explain her motivations, the film is ultimately happy for her to be a villain, much like it never bothers to interrogate Kamenashi’s unscrupulous journalist.

Miike might argue that he’s just looking to entertain his audience, but “Sham” misses the opportunity for a more layered examination of a tricky and emotionally charged subject. Other filmmakers have done this better: Not only Kore-eda, but also Keisuke Yoshida, whose “Intolerance” (2021) and “Missing” (2024) touched on some of the same themes without flattening their complexity. The real-life story of “Sham” required a scalpel to tease apart. Miike brought a shovel.