Wow. It is not often that jmovies come up with a gem like this; a tight murder mystery movie with social commentary and great acting. This girl from a cosmetics company is killed and is dubbed Snow White. Ayano Gou plays the audience's POV character and he works for a television station and is very active on twitter talking about ramen.
Ayano Gou gets a phone call from his old university friend Renbutso Misako who also works at the same company with information on Snow White. Ayano Gou grabs his camera and starts interviewing people connected to the case as he gets closer to the truth.
I like how The Snow White Murder Case takes a look at mass media in Japan. I remember there was a murder case while I was in Japan and every freaking day and seemingly all the time, they would talk endlessly about the case to the point of reporting about trivial things and I'm not talking about your 6 o'clock news.
To me, it went pass news reporting to padding content to television and The Snow White Murder Case looks at the power of media and how it can be abused. Why not report on just the confirmed facts and let the police to their job? Its partly due to the 24 hour news cycle and the need for people consume new information every hour.
Its very similar to sports reporting. Even mundane information becomes news and false reporting is forgotten because there is a new batch of news/rumours/speculation to look forward to. The truth does not matter as much as content creation.
Connected to the power of media is twitter. Ayano Gou's character uses twitter throughout the movie, not just as a way to voice his thoughts to the audience but also to disseminate and receive intel. I love how The Snow White Murder Case looks at the power and danger of social media without being preachy. I thought about giving up at the beginning of the movie cause trying to listen to the dialogue and reading the twitter comments at the same time was so difficult that's only in the beginning.
Lastly the movie also uses the tried and true everyone's got their own version of the story to tell and its up to the audience and Ayano Gou's character to try and piece everything together before the end.
Must watch movie. I haven't seen a Japanese movie this good in quite some time.