Final Rating: 3/5
In Sham, an elementary school teacher becomes the victim of public harassment after being accused of using extreme corporal punishment on one of his students. Part courtroom drama, part character study, Sham incorporates more interesting ideas than it can deliver on.
Sham begins with multiple accounts of the same series of events. Himuro Ritsuko (Shibasaki Kou) tells the court a harrowing account of her son Takuto’s abuse at the hands of his teacher, Yabushita Seiichi (Ayano Go). In their first meeting, Seiichi is revealed to be comically racist, discriminating against the Himuros on account of their American heritage. At school, he regularly beats up Takuto for minor infractions like being untidy or slow. Most shocking of all, when the Himuro family attempts to have Seiichi disciplined by the school, the teacher tells their son to kill himself. Only at the last moment is Takuto saved by his mother physically pulling him down from the ledge.
The shocking opening is framed as “Ritsuko’s Account.” As one might expect, this is immediately followed up by “Seiichi’s Account,” giving the teacher the opportunity to tell his side. Recounted by Seiichi, the same events are much less sensational. His comments about the Himuros’ heritage arise as follow-up questions after Ritsuko brags about her American grandfather. His corporal punishment of Takuto is revealed as a light slap after the boy punched a classmate. The claim that a teacher told one of his students “how to die” is a complete surprise.
With these wildly conflicting accounts of the event, who are we to believe? Director Takashi Miike falls firmly on the side of the teacher. Instead of committing to the structure of unreliable, competing narratives, “Seiichi’s Account” simply continues into the present. Rather than wondering which version of events is true, the central question becomes why a mother would tell such an outrageous lie.
Shibasaki is fantastic as Ritsuko. In the first version of the story, Ritsuko is portrayed as a doting mother to Takuto. She’s warm and fiercely protective, bordering on melodramatic as the abuse her son suffers increases. But from “Seiichi’s Account” onwards, Ritsuko is an entirely different character. She’s cold, calculating, pathologically self-interested. In several scenes, her monotone delivery paired with her eerie stillness makes her come off as a witch. Cinematographer Yamamoto Hideo fills her shots with negative space, making Ritsuko feel ghostly at times.
As the mother’s past becomes a focus of the trial, her shell breaks slightly, yet the performance remains collected. Shibasaki builds a rage within the character that’s felt throughout the courtroom and beyond but remains scarily even in temperament. Her performance is that of an insidious bully, a person who knows exactly how to ruin someone’s life, and probably has a history of doing so.
Ayano also shines as Seiichi. Portrayed as a psychopath by Ritsuko, the real Seiichi is a more timid individual. Ayano fills both roles well, darkly hilarious as a monster, then sympathetic for the larger part of the movie. Flashbacks to his first time tutoring children round out his character, showing someone whose passion for teaching supersedes everything else in his life. It’s heartbreaking to watch the trial destroy Seiichi’s life, as he’s made to apologize for things he didn’t do, loses his position as a teacher, and nearly loses his family.
Overall, the film’s most scathing commentary is leveled at a school system that abandons its teachers. After one of their teachers is accused of misconduct, the school’s administrative staff refuses to hear his side, instead demanding he accept their dictated version of “the truth.” “You used corporal punishment,” he’s told; “You said his blood was tainted.” Even after multiple formal apologies and parent-teacher meetings fail to stop the Himuro family from suing the school, administration simply shifts all responsibility to Seiichi. After all, he apologized, admitting wrongdoing, and he wouldn’t admit to something that wasn’t true, would he?
The story of Sham is compelling. A false accusations story in the vein of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, with structural allusions to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. However, the presentation of that story is unremarkable. The unreliability is immediately undercut once the mother is established as a villain. Seiichi’s time as a teacher, how he actually behaves in the classroom, his thoughts on discipline in general, are hinted at, but not really explored. Most damningly, Takuo, the child at the centre of the abuse case, is a minor character. The audience is shown that he’s either a sensitive, gentle soul (in Ritsuko’s Account), or a brat and a class bully (in Seiichi’s Account), but his perspective is never shown – the little we see of him implies his perspective wouldn’t even be interesting.
And so in Miike’s hands, Sham becomes a relatively straightforward story about an extraordinary teacher cut down in his prime thanks to parents who abhor discipline. That commentary isn’t meaningless, but it leaves plenty of interesting threads on the table.
Sham was seen during the 2026 Toronto Japanese Film Festival.
