Toshiro is a quiet, dependable husband and father who runs a machinery shop out of his house. His family’s placid domestic life is disrupted, however, when Toshiro’s old friend Yasaka comes calling after having just been released from prison. Mysterious yet well-mannered, Yasaka movies in, Toshiro gives him work, and the situation seems tenable… until shadows from the men’s shared past begin creeping in, and the smooth veneer of Toshiro’s marriage starts showing cracks.

Kôji Fukada’s latest is a meticulously rendered slow-burn, a psychologically acute tale of punishment and crime that pulls us deeper into its world of familial tension and fraught allegiances with every elegantly measured scene.