Okaeri

Shinozaki's debut feature (the deliberately Ozu-esque title is the set expression for welcoming someone home) argues speciously that it takes something as grave as a mental crack-up to bring warmth and sincerity into a 'typical' Japanese marriage. Kitazawa is a primary school teacher, an average neglectful husband; his childless wife Yuriko has a part-time job but spends most of her days pining for her lost career as a concert pianist...until she slips into paranoid delusions and starts to behave with alarming oddity. The woman's unexplained lack of relatives or friends to turn to tips you the wink that this version of Japanese home life is phoney from the word go, and the endless elaboration of her schizophrenia is a repellently cruel way of conveying her need for tenderness and love. Pretentious and ugly.