Writer/director Kôji Fukada misses badly here, attempting a reversal into tragedy from elements in his comic breakout success HOSPITALITÉ/’10. The situations oddly similar at first as a stranger enters the lives, home and garage workshop (here, tool & die rather than photocopying) of a modest household, nearly taking over as head-of-the-family. But unlike the earlier film’s larky tone, here all is sinister, and much unexplained. The stranger is no stranger, but just out of prison for murder. Something the taciturn father knows, yet takes little mind of, hiring him to work in the shop & to live upstairs as a new tenant. With a wife & daughter in the house? Soon, the wife is responding to the stranger’s sexual aura; the little girl blossoming under his attention. Then things move from merely off-balance to sociopathic before an eight year jump short-circuits everything, changing the drama from haunted character mystery to sorrowful revenge. Plus a new, young shop intern with personal ties to past events. But plot mechanics that worked perfectly well for comedy, now come off melodramatic & forced. A steady drip of guilty secrets, revealed like so many melodramatic story beats. (Asghar Farhadi in films like A SEPARATION/’11, is a master at these things.) Fukada reduced to having old secret photographs spill out of a bag and seen by the 'wrong' person to keep his plot moving. A pity.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: The story summaries of other Fukada films (not seen here) sound deadly serious. Perhaps HOSPITALITÉ was his happy outlier.
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