Lesson of the Evil

Plot

High school English teacher Seiji Hasumi is secretly a sociopath. He has killed both his parents and his former tutor at the age of 14. While living in the United States, Hasumi meets Clay, another sociopath. The two commit numerous murders together. Hasumi eventually kills Clay, stating that while the latter enjoys killing for fun, the former does not.

Back in Japan, Hasumi collects all of the students' phones prior to an exam and secretly uses a phone jammer to prevent cheating. Meanwhile, a father who had complained about the bullying of his daughter Rina dies when someone replaces the bottles of water around his house with kerosene; it explodes when he tries to smoke a cigarette.

Tsurii, the adviser of the Radio Club, soon meets with Keisuke, the ringleader of a group of cheating students. Tsurii has dug into Hasumi's past and discovered that four students died of apparent suicides at his previous school. Hasumi, having bugged the room, later kills Tsurii, making his death appear as a suicide. Hasumi later knocks Keisuke out and ties him up. After being tortured by Hasumi, Keisuke admits that he and his friends were cheating. After checking that Keisuke did not tell others of Tsurii's suspicions, Hasumi kills him and hides his body.

Hasumi later learns that physical education teacher Shibahara is blackmailing a student, Miya, into giving him sexual favors. After he helps her eliminate Shibahara's leverage, Hasumi and Miya become lovers. Hasumi also discovers art teacher Kume's sexual relationship with a student; he blackmails Kume into lending him his luxury apartment. Hasumi then takes Miya there, and the two have sex. Hasumi presses Miya into giving him access to an online private discussion board that the students use, anonymously making claims about the murder of Rina's father, accusing delinquent student Tadenuma. Hasumi invites Tadenuma out for a drink and kills him; the students later assume that Tadenuma ran away from home.

Students later stay overnight in the school, preparing a haunted house for the school cultural festival. When Miya grows suspicious of Tadenuma's disappearance, Hasumi throws her off a roof and forges a suicide note with her signature. However, another student soon appears and finds the note; Hasumi kills her, too. As Hasumi has no method of masking this last murder, he decides to massacre his students. Hasumi tricks most of the students by using the intercom to order them to proceed to the roof, which he has already locked. Some students hide inside the art room, closing it off with fire shutters and barricading the entry points.

Student Kakeru escapes the school and finds a man who calls the police. He later returns to the school to rescue student Satomi, who tries to escape by roping out of the art room window, slips and breaks her ankles. Hasumi is alerted to their presence and proceeds to shoot them dead from a window with a shotgun. Using Satomi's rope, Hasumi climbs into the art room and slays every student inside.

After the massacre, Hasumi tries to cover up his actions by making it seem like Kume handcuffed him, killed everyone and committed suicide afterward. However, Hasumi's plans are foiled when one of two surviving students who faked their deaths points out to police that the school's training defibrillator records audio. The defibrillator ends up containing evidence of one of the victims speaking Hasumi's name before being slain. Hasumi is arrested, but plans to use his recently learned knowledge of Norse mythology as his legal defense by suggesting his acts are "the will of God." It is then revealed that Miya also survived Hasumi's attack.

Cast

Hideaki Itō as Seiji Hasumi

Takayuki Yamada as Tetsuro Shibahara

Mitsuru Fukikoshi as Masanobu Tsurii

Takehiro Hira as Takeki Kume

Shōta Sometani as Keisuke Hayami

Shun Miyazato as Naoki Isada

Fumi Nikaidō as Reika Katagiri

Elina Mizuno as Miya Yasuhara

Kento Hayashi as Masahiko Maejima

Kenta as Masahiro Tadenuma

Kodai Asaka as Yuichiro Nagoshi

Jodi Lynn Smith as Suzanna Carter

Release

The film premiered at the Rome Film Festival on November 9, 2012. It was selected to screen at the Stanley Film Festival in April 2014. It was released in Toho-affiliated theaters on November 10, 2012.

It was released on 309 screens nationwide, including TOHO Cinemas Nichigeki. Over its opening two days—November 10 and 11, 2012—it grossed ¥298,945,000 and drew an audience of 215,059, debuting at number two in the box office rankings (compiled by Kogyo Tsushinsha). The text that reads "TO BE CONTINUED" at the end of the film reflects the desire of director Takashi Miike—expressed in both the original source material and the film's program—to create a sequel; the original author, Yusuke Kishi, has also stated in the program that he wishes to write a continuation.

Reception

Jay Weissberg of Variety gave the movie a negative review, calling it "nothing more than a slick slasher pic" and pointing out its debatable taste: "Even were the memory of the Breivik massacre, among others, not so fresh, there's something deeply unseemly about turning a high-school bloodbath into an adrenaline-pumping pleasure ride."

Jessica Kiang of The Playlist panned the film, calling it "overlong and incoherent" and "sadly more bore than gore". She did not see see any deeper meaning in the film, saying: "It's just too silly to lay a claim to any philosophy, even nihilism."

Jonathan Barkan of the horror website Bloody Disgusting calls the movie "thoroughly entertaining and exciting", but criticizes that it overstays its welcome and would "benefit from a slightly tighter final cut." Takayuki Yamada won Best Supporting Actor at the 34th Yokohama Film Festival for his performances in this film, The Samurai That Night, and The Floating Castle.

Lesson of the Evil earned $25.9 million at the Japanese box office.