Suspect X

A man's body is found in a vacant lot, his face destroyed beyond recognition and his hands burned. The medical examiner determines he died by strangulation, and the investigation falls to Detective Kaoru Utsumi. The victim's former wife emerges as the leading suspect, but her alibi appears unbreakable, and the inquiry stalls. Utsumi turns for help to Manabu Yukawa, a brilliant physicist at her old university who occasionally assists the police with cases they cannot crack. Yukawa's attention settles on the suspect's neighbor, Tetsuya Ishigami, a gifted mathematician and a former classmate of his. The film is based on Keigo Higashino's novel and is part of the Galileo series, in which Fukuyama plays the physicist.

Hiroshi Nishitani directed, working from a screenplay by Yasushi Fukuda; the producers were Tadashi Makino and Kazutoshi Wadakura. Suspect X was Nishitani's third feature, following Star Reformer in 2006 and Akechi Mitsuhide: The Man God Hated in 2007, and he later directed Galileo XX in 2013. Masaharu Fukuyama leads as Yukawa, with Ko Shibasaki as Utsumi, Shinichi Tsutsumi as Ishigami, and Kazuki Kitamura as Shumpei Kusanagi. On IMDb the film holds a rating of 7.4 from roughly 4,400 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 7.6 from about 144 votes.