Funuke: Show Some Love, You Losers!

Rural Japan. When a freak road accident does for their parents, brother and sister Shinji and Kyomi try to pick up the pieces, a process made testing by the return of their other sibling, Sumika – a self-centred tyrant who’s failed in her ambition to make it as an actress in Tokyo, and arrives bristling with attitude. Indeed, so outrageously bitchy is Sumika’s behaviour (served up with relish in Erika Sato’s choice performance) that writer-director Daihachi Yoshida injects a strong element of black humour into an otherwise familiar tale of a dysfunctional household.

What’s distinctive is the way the film takes stock characters from Japanese TV soaps (Hiromi Nagasaku plays Shinji’s effusively submissive wife to perfection) and filters them into a skittish US-indie-styled dramedy, though with Kyomi’s manga-drawing skills a key part of the scenario, the visual approach is sometimes too fluffily decorative to let the emotions deliver in full. Eminently likeable nonetheless.