Harmonium

An old acquaintance turns up at the door of Toshio, who runs a small metal workshop: Yasaka, just out of prison. He is given work, moves into a room in the house and grows close to the wife and daughter. Just as the family seems to have found its missing piece, an accident splits everything in two. Koji Fukada wrote and directed. Tadanobu Asano plays Yasaka, Kanji Furutachi plays Toshio, Mariko Tsutsui the wife. It won the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2016. The story is cut in half: before the accident and eight years after. In the second half nobody has healed, they have only learned to keep quiet. Fukada opens the characters' pasts step by step and keeps shifting where the guilt sits; the accident is not a cause but the surfacing of a rot already there. A white shirt, the harmonium and the riverbank are its recurring visual marks. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet, cold Japanese family drama. Who it is not for: anyone wanting resolution; the film forgives nobody and closes nothing in its final scene.