Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s family drama Tokyo Sonata is a frightening exploration of job loss.

Los Angeles Times / KEN HIVELY

A genius of dread, known for his unnerving horror films and eerie thrillers, the wildly prolific Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa tends to ply his trade with spooky silences, a lived-in feel for everyday, droning life and a sense of social unease.

Although his latest to hit the American big screen, Tokyo Sonata, looks like a family melodrama — if a distinctly eccentric variant on the typical domestic affair — there is more than a touch of horror to its story of a worker whose downsizing sets off a series of cataclysmic events.

In many respects, the family members here don’t look much different from the characters who populate Kurosawa’s other movies, some of whom are inexplicably driven to kill. Inexplicably or perhaps just unexplained: Unlike most genre directors in Hollywood and other commercial provenances, Kurosawa spends little time illuminating the mysteries of life, death and murder, the great whys that preoccupy filmmakers and invariably reduce being to behaviorism or DNA.The bloodletting is metaphoric in his new movie, which, soon after the opening credits, cuts to a Tokyo office where corporate drones are briskly marching through the corridors. Minutes later, Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa), an administrative middle manager, has packed his belongings in a paper shopping bag and headed out, having been rendered redundant. Instead of telling his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), however, Ryuhei continues to leave the house every morning, wearing a suit and tie and carrying his briefcase, props in an elaborate, increasingly desperate pantomime that takes him from standing in the unemployment lines to scrubbing public toilets on his hands and knees.

As Ryuhei tries to keep up appearances, his family’s facade crumbles. The oldest son, Takashi (Yu Koyanagi), seeks to enlist in the American military, which, to support its expanding war in the Middle East, has begun to accept foreign recruits. The youngest son, Kenji (Kai Inowaki), meanwhile, begins using his lunch money to pay for piano lessons given by a melancholic beauty, Kaneko (Haruka Igawa).

Lying on the sofa one night, Megumi poignantly asks Ryuhei to pull her up, but he’s already left the room. Raising her arms, she entreats “Somebody, please lift me up,” but we’re the only ones listening.

Though no one does help her, Megumi ends up on a wild ride with a near-crazed would-be thief played by the great Koji Yakusho. By the time she heads off, the family has scattered like leaves, blown down such divergent paths that there are moments when it feels as if each were inhabiting an entirely different movie. Yet as the family disperses, Kurosawa ceaselessly brings them together through the editing. Long before the movie’s unexpectedly moving finale, which pivots on an ethereal rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” he keeps the discordant layers of his composition in harmonious play.

As it ticks through the familiar ills brought about by a country outsourcing and downsizing itself into crisis, Tokyo Sonata takes on increasingly uncanny and timely resonance for an American audience. Kurosawa’s social critiques rarely reverberate as loudly as this one: Ryuhei and Megumi even argue about his patriarchal authority, a fight that begins on a note of pathos but soon turns scarily violent: Having been victimized by his employer and, by extension, the country that creates the conditions for these harsh economic realities, the paterfamilias becomes a victimizer. But this being a Kiyoshi Kurosawa movie, nothing else happens the way you expect, particularly given the lessons you glean from other movies.

Despite the catastrophes visited on the family and a few other characters, and in spite of its deep well of melancholia, Tokyo Sonata ends on a strangely, almost insistently optimistic note. Much of that optimism emanates from the youngest son, whose desire to play the piano becomes a form of generational resistance against his father, who, without explanation, insists he do no such thing. Domination, like family life, has become a hollow ritual here. An economic crisis shakes the family up — it brings the father to his knees, lifts the mother, almost destroys one son and liberates the other — but it’s art, useless art, that unites them.

***1/2Tokyo Sonata

Starring: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyoko Koizumi, Yu Koyanagi, Kai Inowaki, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda, Koji Yakusho. In Japanese with English subtitles.

Rated: PG-13, contains family dysfunction, two off-screen deaths and one bloody hit-and-run.