09-04-2025
‘The Brothers Kitaura': A sordid tale of filial impropriety
Corpse disposal is a complicated business even at the best of times. All the more so if you're as hapless as the eponymous protagonists of 'The Brothers Kitaura.' Masaki Tsujino's sophomore feature, which won the Critics' Picks Competition at last year's Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, is a tale of desperation compounded by incompetence and self-interest. When its characters find themselves in over their heads, they keep digging.
At the start of the film, older sibling Sota (Masaaki Nakano) is in a state of arrested development: unemployed, work-shy and still living with his elderly father, Goichi (Taka Takao). He may be in his 40s, but Sota acts like an eternal teen, sleeping in late, getting up to no good when he's home alone and leaving his dad to do all the cooking. So when the latter threatens to turf him out in favor of a potential marriage partner, the ungrateful son chooses fight over flight, leading to an altercation that ends with Goichi lying dead on the kitchen floor.
Unaccustomed to having to clean up his own mess, Sota enlists the help of his estranged brother, Akira (Hirota Otsuka), who's already in a bit of a pickle himself. Once the family's high-flier, the younger Kitaura is now facing personal ruin after an email blunder led to him getting fired for sexual harassment, then served divorce papers by his wife. You'd think he wouldn't want to add 'accessory to murder' to his list of problems, but he's more concerned about his job prospects than doing the right thing. I mean, who's going to hire the brother of a convicted killer, right?
This is a much more acerbic film than Tsujino's debut feature, 'A Tale of the Riverside' (2020). Reviewing that movie for The Japan Times, Mark Schilling noted that all of its characters were ultimately likable, but Sota and Akira are too busy squabbling among themselves to earn the audience's sympathy.
They're paragons of a very middle-class brand of mediocrity. Thanks to the financial safety net their father provided, both have reached middle age without ever having to take much initiative. Their attempts to get rid of their benefactor's corpse — a symbolic act, if ever you wanted one — are predictably pathetic.
'The Brothers Kitaura' features some impressive displays of ineptitude (as when the brothers try to squeeze the body into an obviously undersized suitcase), punctuated by extended bouts of bickering and inertia. After unintentionally offing his father, Sota's first reaction is to drape a towel over the dead man's face and retire to bed.
The film recalls an earlier generation of movies about patricide, such as Terrence Malick's 'Badlands' (1973) and Kazuhiko Hasegawa's 'The Youth Killer' (1976), except in this case, the kids aren't exactly young themselves. Tsujino's script could probably have done more with this: Although there's an element of social critique here, it mostly takes a backseat to the bumbling neo-noir shenanigans.
These are entertaining, although the obviously cash-strapped production struggles to pull off some of its big set pieces. Tsujino's background in shōgekijō (small-scale theater) also manifests itself in an unfortunate tendency to let scenes run on for too long, in the manner of an improv comedy skit that doesn't know when to end. But when the curtain finally falls on this sordid family affair, it's a delicious kiss-off.
