Harmonium

Fukada never resorts to melodramatics, and instead allows the carefully calibrated performances to give the movie its disquieting power.

If you treat Harmonium like a mood piece, and respond to it on that level, you'll find yourself thinking about it long after you watch it.

This chilly tale of violent secrets and unvoiced misery relies heavily on the skill of actors who seem to know that one false move could tip the whole enterprise into comedy.

By its unforgiving conclusion, Harmonium has plunged headlong into tragedy, but not quite in the way you might imagine.

Just as in the best old-school, Cain-style noir, Fukada's film is eloquent about the fragile privileges of modern urban life and the hidden lies it can be built upon.

A compelling but relentlessly downbeat Japanese melodrama.

It shocks us long after we walk out of the theater, not with the short-lived scare of a jump cut or grisly image, but with something darker that lives quietly in the unexamined places of the soul.

Throughout Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada works in a rapt and lucid hyper-textural style that suggests a merging of the sensibilities of Alfred Hitchcock and Yasujirô Ozu.

The softness and straightness of the performances obscure the monstrous melodrama underneath.

Rather than employ Harmonium's setup for humorous or bittersweet insights, Fukada distills the conceit into his most harrowing, tragic parable to date.

Tsutsui's tightly coiled performance is particularly compelling, a fury burning beneath her wearied, accommodating exterior.