Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on September 2011

Despite the fact that Japanese theaters are filled with commercial tripe usually based on manga or some kind of long-time franchise, art-house cinema is in fact alive and well in Japan. The country still produces plenty of thought-provoking work. Director Koki Yoshida has been described as the primary disciple of distinguished indie filmmaker Nobuhiko Suwa (his instructor at Tokyo Zokei University) and acted as assistant director for previously hot underground auteur Shinya Tsukamoto. The present piece is a Pia Film Festival scholarship work and they have a great track record of funding fine film. Kazoku X, or Household X as it’s called in English, is a portrait of a family suffocated by stasis and ennui, where communication has stopped. Michiko (Kaho Minami) appears to be your average housewife but a few minutes under the jittery gaze of Yoshida’s handheld camera and we can see she is obsessive-compulsive, bulimic, and lost in alienation. Of the latter, much the same can be said for her loser husband Kenichi (Tomorowo Taguchi) and their freeter son Hiroaki (Tomohiro Kaku). There’s a resonance between the characters’ uneasy, quietly desperate lives and the queasy camerawork of odd angles and shaky shots. While the film does communicate the breakdown of contemporary families in Japan it takes few chances storywise and thus falls short of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s masterpiece on familial alienation, Tokyo Sonata (2008). (English title: Household X; 95 min)