Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Pulse, Bright Future) has a rare knack for imbuing seemingly ordinary situations with apocalyptic significance. It's put to good use here as a Tokyo businessman (Teruyuki Kagawa) decides he can't face the shame of telling his family that he's been made redundant. Unable to find new work, he commutes into the city each morning and queues for charity food handouts until his wife discovers his deception. Kagawa is superb as the haggard, droopy-faced breadwinner facing obsolescence, while co-star Kyoko Koizumi has a deceptively passive role as the family's long-suffering mother. Dissecting not just the loss of paternal authority but a global malaise - something underscored by a subplot in which eldest son Yu Koyanagi joins the peacekeeping effort in Iraq - it's a mysterious, multilayered film that rewards careful viewing.

The winds of change blow as a family grapples with unemployment, alienation, mistrust and a lack of communication. When a Japanese salaryman loses his job to outsourcing to China, it's simply the beginning of a series of shattering incidents, leading to the implosion of the family unit.