A man confesses to murder and a lawyer is given the high-profile case. Sensationalist claims in newspapers, the man's constantly shifting story, and an increasingly strange succession of revelations lead to several theories for a motive. The majority of the stories surrounding this murder are told verbally through testimony or interview, with new facts throwing a new light on old ones, and so on and so forth. None of these versions of events can be wholly true, but equally they're all as viable as the next — to the point that this lawyer abandons the futile search for the truth to choose a legal strategy that gives him the best chance of reducing his client's sentence from the death penalty to life in prison.
A legal system seemingly rigged against defendants and designed to discourage people from fighting murder charges is a good fit for Kore-eda. In the same way as Still Walking or After The Storm, two films in which families reunite for a moment and find a way to move on, together, these threads, as conflicting and disparate as they are, all reach a polyphony with one another. There's no way to find a "whole truth" that will resolve this case, just as nothing can ever really be fixed in Kore-eda's cinema. However, in one way or another, the process of trying to fix something is enough of a step in the right direction to be okay with the fact it's still broken. It's the effort that counts.