Lesson of the Evil

Aku no Kyōten
Directed by	Takashi Miike
Written by	Takashi Miike
Based on	Aku no Kyōten by Yusuke Kishi
Produced by	Kôji Azuma Tōru Mori Misako Saka
Starring	Hideaki Itō Takayuki Yamada Mitsuru Fukikoshi
Cinematography	Nobuyasu Kita
Edited by	Kenji Yamashita
Music by	Koji Endo
Production company	Toho
Release dates	November 9, 2012 (2012-11-09) (Rome Film Festival) November 10, 2012 (2012-11-10) (Japan)
Running time	128 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese
Box office	$25.9 million[1]

Aku no Kyōten (悪の教典, literally "Lesson of Evil"), known in English as Lesson of the Evil, is a 2012 Japanese

.

Plot

Seiji Hasumi, an English teacher, is loved by his students and respected by his peers. He graduates from Harvard University with an MBA and works at Morgenstern, a European investment bank, for two years. Hasumi returns to Japan to pursue high school teaching. However, his outward charm masks his true nature. In reality, Hasumi is a sociopath unable to feel empathy for other human beings. Specifically, he has a severe antisocial personality disorder. Having killed both his parents and his former tutor at the age of fourteen, Hasumi becomes a fiendishly clever killer. During his time in the States, Hasumi meets a partner in crime, an American named Clay, who thinks he shares the same "hobby" as Hasumi– killing people for fun. The two carry buckets full of human blood, bones, and organs somewhere, giving off the notion that they committed numerous murders while working together. Hasumi eventually kills his partner by knocking him out and burning him alive inside a barrel, stating that while Clay enjoys killing for fun, Hasumi does not.

Back in Japan, Hasumi chooses to deal with problems like bullying and student sexual harassment, starting by dealing with the school cheating issue. Upon collecting all of the students' cell phones prior to their exams, Hasumi secretly uses a

. Hasumi then confronts Keisuke after the announcement of Tsurii's suicide causes him to panic. Hasumi knocks Keisuke out and ties him up until the end of school, after which Hasumi tortures him into admitting that he and his friends were cheating. Hasumi checks that Keisuke didn't tell others of Tsurii's suspicions before killing him and hiding his body.

During the same time period, Hasumi is brought to the attention of a blackmail case by one of his students. A store owner, Meka, caught a female student, Miya, shoplifting but swears not to charge her for it. However, PE teacher Shibahara blackmails Miya, as he has recorded her admission of shoplifting, into giving him sexual favors or risk being charged. Hasumi assures Miya that a blackmail and statutory rape case is more severe than shoplifting and affirms that she is safe from the law and no longer needs to succumb to the blackmail. Miya later meets Hasumi on the school roof. She thanks him with a hug that advances into a kiss, and the two become lovers. In the meantime, Hasumi finds out about art teacher Kume's sexual relationship with a male student; he blackmails Kume into lending him his luxury apartment. Hasumi later takes Miya to the apartment, and the two have sex. Hasumi presses Miya into giving him access to an online private discussion board that his students use, anonymously making claims about the murder of Rina's father, accusing delinquent student Tadenuma, who had targeted Rina online previously. After a fight breaks out at the school, Hasumi invites Tadenuma out for a drink and murders him; the students later assume that Tadenuma ran away from home.

Events have passed until Hasumi's homeroom students are staying overnight in the school, preparing an elaborate

of his students, for which he will frame Kume, who frequents a shooting range, by wearing his shoes throughout the killings. Throughout the massacre, Hasumi's shotgun can be seen possessed by ex-partner in crime Clay, talking to him. As the students hear the bangs of the shotgun, Hasumi tricks most of the students by using the intercom to warn them of "an intruder with a shotgun" and orders the students to proceed to the roof- which he locked access to beforehand- and wait until help arrives. With some of the students proceeding to the stairs to the roof, another group hides inside the art room, closing it off with fire shutters and barricading the entry points. One of the students, skilled archer Kakeru, manages to escape the school far enough with his archery gear to find a man who is able to call the police. He later runs back to the school to rescue his crush Satomi, found trying to escape by roping out of the art room window and slips, breaking her ankles. Kakeru screams out her name, alerting Hasumi to their presence, who then proceeds to aim out of a window at the two students. Kakeru readies an arrow and fires at Hasumi, but Hasumi fires as well, deflecting the arrow off-course, slaying Kakeru and then Satomi. With the group of students still in the art room thinking they are safe, they are unaware that they did not untie the rope that Satomi had used to rappel down. Hasumi climbs the rope and proceeds to slay the group.

The massacre climaxes with two students who survive by dressing up two dead peers in their clothing and hiding inside the school. They toss the corpses down an emergency escape chute, tricking Hasumi into thinking the bodies are the last two students on his checklist attempting to escape. After the massacre at the school, Hasumi tries to cover up his actions by making it seem like he had been handcuffed and knocked out by Kume and making it look like he committed suicide afterward with Hasumi's shotgun, but his plans are foiled due to one of the two surviving students pointing out to the police that the school's training defibrillator records audio and contains evidence of one of the murdered students speaking his murderer's name before being slain by Hasumi. As he is arrested, Hasumi plans to use his recently learned knowledge of

."

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.^[4] It was selected to screen at the Stanley Film Festival in April 2014.

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."^[5]

Jessica Kiang pans the movie, calling it "overlong and incoherent" and "sadly more bore than gore". She doesn't see any deeper meaning in this either: "It's just too silly to lay a claim to any philosophy, even nihilism."^[6]

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."^[7]

Lesson of the Evil earned $25.9 million at the Japanese box office.^[8]

References

External links

• Official website
• Lesson of the Evil at
  IMDb