Still Walking

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. Starring Hiroshi Abe, Yui Natsukawa, Kazuya Takahashi, Shohei Tanaka Club, IFI, Dublin, 114 min

CINEMA HAS often used the death of a child – that most horrifically unexpected of traumas – to release tensions within otherwise ordered families. Think of The Son's Room, Ordinary Peopleand In the Bedroom.

Still Walking, a beautifully measured, impressively resonant Japanese film from Hirokazu Kore-Eda, director of After Lifeand Nobody Knows, manages to do fresh things with that formula. The film is rarely busy and never overheated, but it brims over with sincerity and craft.

Once a year, the Yokoyama family comes together to honour a son drowned while saving another boy’s life. On this particular occasion, some 15 years after the event, Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), the younger sibling – resented by his doctor father for an unfocused career and for surviving his brother – has brought his new wife to meet the family. Dad is predictably hostile. Mother, wary of the fact that Ryota’s bride is a widow, is somewhat more welcoming, but retains the right to mutter the odd caustic aside. Also present are an older sister and her husband.

Still Walkingplays out in a series of unhurried but strangely tense interchanges, during which characters dance around the true motivations behind their disputes and resentments. The weekend reaches its uneasy climax during a visit by a large, clumsy man with an uncomfortable manner. This, it transpires, is the fellow the dead boy saved.

Though it follows formal patterns common to Japanese cinema, the film hangs around a story that could be told in any culture. Perhaps an American or Irish film would feel the need to unleash the hidden tensions in a fury of catharsis, but the tension created by the characters’ inhibition actually adds to the drama of Kore-Eda’s knotty little story.

Told in long, steady takes, featuring a sweet, plucked score, this fine film whispers its way insidiously into your brain and stays there.