Search Film, Company, People...

THE VOICE OF SIN

罪の声

By Nobuhiro DOI

TBS (TOKYO BROADCASTING SYSTEM TELEVISION, INC.) - as SALES All rights, World

Crime - Completed 2020

- Year of production
- 2020
- Genres
- Crime, Thriller, Book adaptation
- Countries
- JAPAN
- Languages
- JAPANESE
- Duration
- 140 mn
- Director(s)
- Nobuhiro DOI
- Writer(s)
- Akiko NOGI
- Cast
- Shun OGURI, Hoshino GEN
- Synopsis
- -What if you learned one day that you once committed a terrible crime but never knew it?
  
  Shunya Sone (Gen Hoshino) is a 39-year-old Kyoto tailor living a happy domestic life with his wife and 5-year-old daughter.
  One day, while rummaging through belongings, he finds an old cassette tape left by his deceased father. He is surprised to hear a recording of his own voice on the tape from over 30 years ago.
  But that’s when the discovery turns troubling. 35 years ago, all of Japan was gripped in panic over a publicized telephone threat made to a major food company in which a criminal group used a child’s voice. And that voice was identical Sone’s. At the time, the perpetrators had been toying with the media and police by sending frequent forecasts of impending poisonings of snacks sold by the maker. Despite having become an unprecedented case in Japanese crime history, the uproar ultimately subsided out without any arrests ever being made and its statute of limitations expiring, leaving many unsolved mysteries. Sone is flabbergasted and frankly frightened by the tape. “That’s definitely my voice. But how and why?”
  If this fact were to slip out to the media, he would be suspected without any causes, and it would surely bring shame upon his family. While fearful of learning the truth, Sone knows he must do whatever necessary to protect his name and his family, and begins tracing the past of his father.
  
  Meanwhile, a 38-year-old mid-tier newspaper journalist, Eiji Akutsu (Shun Oguri) has been assigned to a feature about the unsolved case from years ago. He goes in search of new evidence beginning with testimony gathered by those were around at the time. His attention then turns to the child’s voice used by the criminals to threaten the food company by phone. The voices of three children, it turns out, were used. But who were these children? And where are they now?
  
  From his witness testimony, Akutsu learns there is another man out there hunting down information about the case. It is Shunya Sone, owner of one of the “child voices” from the case. Meanwhile, Sone beings to sense danger mounting the deeper he probes into the past. Akutsu tries to approach Sone as he closes in on the truth, but Sone flees fearing that the media might come to learn of his relationship to the case.
  So two men, one pursuing the other, find themselves bound by the same purpose but with opposing interests. Fate will finally bring them together in the same place at the end of their struggle.
  “When children are involved in crime, it’s a harsh indictment on society.”
  The two men anguish over the fate of the kids who were involved in the case, and seek to spare them from a bleak future. They become determined to find the truth behind a shroud of unsolved mystery. As they zero in on the real culprit, they expose the true crime behind an incident that tragically put children in harm’s way and tarnished people’s faith in society.