While geek show operators like Takashi Miike continue to dominate articles about "new, exciting" Japanese cinema, the writer-director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has spent the past ten or twelve years quietly building a strong, surprising body of work that adds up to an ongoing portrait of a society cracking under unbelievable stress--stress so great that people who've never let themselves express a rude sentiment before snap and turn violent, and the line between our world and that of the departed spirits fizzles and melts away. Like Miike, Kurosawa is a provocateur, but while Miike gets your attention with weird concepts and bloody shocks, Kurosawa unsettles you with long, contemplative takes that get under your skin and shake up your nervous system. He was originally tagged as one of the "J-Horror" specialists, but there's a reason that his scariest movies, such as Cure (1997) and 2001'a Pulse (which was calamitously remade by Hollywood a few years ago), haven't inspired English-language franchises like the Ring and Grudge pictures. They're the product of a highly individual sensibility and way of looking at the world, and they don't make a lot of sense without Kurosawa's unifying style, which gives them the ineffable logical plausibility of a bad dream. Sometimes, as with Charisma, starring Kurosawa's favorite leading man, Koji Yakusho, as a big city detective who flees to the country and gets involved in local warfare over what may be a haunted tree, they don't even make sense with Kurosawa at the helm, and his daring conceptions and mix of good and bad ideas hit the wall with a splat. But at his best, he can justify a familiar rationalization sometimes offered by horror fans about much lesser artists--what may seem confusing or illogical about his movies makes them that much more frightening. His new Tokyo Sonata is being touted as a change of pace for the director, because it doesn't feature ghosts or serial murderers. Instead, it achieves the same kind of magnetic tension as Kurosawa's earlier movies, but here they're inspired by such everyday elements as uneasiness about economic stability, social class, and a family's lapses of faith in each other. If you think that makes it less scary, more power to you.

The movie begins with Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), a middle-aged salaryman with a wife and two sons, being kicked to the curb by his company. He is too ashamed to share this development with the family--no great moment in decision-making on his part, because he barely communicates with them at all anyway, aside from the occasional expression of disapproval at his younger son's interest in music. Kagawa continues to dress for work everyday and go out to prowl the streets, eventually hooking up with another secretly laid-off businessman who has his cell phone set to ring at regular intervals so that he can still keep up an appearance of being overworked. (His new friend eventually brings him home for dinner and introduces him to his wife as a guy from the office.) Ryuhei seems to be part of a whole subculture of unemployed men who are continuing to go through the motions that they think are all that can give their lives meaning, and it' not untypical of Kurosawa that, as soon as he has you convinced that there might be able to spend the movie exploring this world, he veers off and gets involved in the other members of Ryuhei's family, each of whom has reasons for seeing this colorless, desperate wretch as some kind of domestic tyrant and who need to break away themselves.

Tokyo Sonata grows crazier as it goes along, especially when Koji Yakusho arrives, wild-haired and red-eyed, as a burglar who carjacks Ryuhei's wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) as part of a long sequence in which both parents and their child, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), all stay out all night and experience some sort of epiphany before returning home for breakfast. (Kurosawa seems to lose track of the teenage son, played by Yu Koyangi, who announces that he's heading off to fight in Iraq and checks back in just long enough to confess that this wasn't such a hot idea.) For a while, I thought the movie might go the way of Charisma, but Kurosawa manages to hold things together so that the movie is still on the rails when it reaches the finale, in which the family comes together to share in the celebration as Kenji, who's been taking piano lessons behind his father's back, gives a public demonstration of what he's learned. It's a great scene, and a hopeful one--and, as a sign of the director confidently extending his range, a reason to be optimistic about Kurosawa's future.

Related: Precursors: Time Out (2001)