Thicker Than Water 
犬猿 「Kenen」
Release Date: February 10th, 2018
Duration: 106 mins.
Director: Keisuke Yoshida
Writer: Keisuke Yoshida (Screenplay),
Starring: Keiko Enoue, Miwako Kakei, Masataka Kubota, Hirofumi Arai, Ryohei Abe, Aisa Takeuchi, Katsuya Kobayashi, Takenori Goto,
You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your family, the old saying goes, and the torture of being related to someone you despise is mined for material by Keisuke Yoshida. Using an original script he wrote, he misanthropically pairs two sets of unhappy siblings with each other for a miserable time.
The film takes place in a small town and zeroes in on the small lives of two sets of siblings who are stuck with each other. First there are two sisters, the eldest being the intelligent, hard-working, and homely Yuria Ikuno (Keiko Enoue) who has taken on the responsibility of running her family’s small printing company while her younger, prettier and ditsier sister Mako (Miwako Kakei) shirks work and pursues movie stardom. Each resents the other and shows it with a constant stream of passive-aggressive behaviour like nasty put-downs based on looks and brains.
For the two sisters are two brothers whose relationship is equally calamitous, though more physically violent. The youngest brother, a polite and diligent office worker named Kazunari Kanayama (Masataka Kubota), finds his life, his home, and his bank account invaded by his rough-hewn older brother Takuji (disgraced actor Hirofumi Arai) who has just finished a prison sentence for armed robbery. Kazunari’s feels like his lifelong position as his older brother’s doormat is reinstated and the timid young man chafes at the indignity of being host and hostage to potential criminal activities.
Director Yoshida is good at dramedies featuring mismatched people. Rom-com The Workhorse & Big Mouth, and mother movie My Little Sweet Pea are at the more gentle end of things. Thicker than Water definitely shows his cruel streak.
His narrative set-up is to set up the parallel sibling relationships and cut between them. He shows the conflicts that arise from pitting chalk-and-cheese characters against each other in increasingly fractious situations. These take the form of vignettes of their daily lives. Mako charms male customers with ease and is showered with praise while Yuria is seen as ogreish and is treated as such by those around her. Kazunari is much put upon by others and awkwardly waits on the sidelines for his brother to stop beating people up. Things are more complicated than that, however.
The cold war of resentments and jealousies between each siblings becomes hot when their orbits intersect as Kazunari commissions Yuria’s company for work on a poster campaign and she falls for the young man. This romance is ammunition for a petty Mako as she uses him in her feud with her sister. Meanwhile, Kazunari is oblivious to what is going on in the hearts of the women as he has to handle Takuji who is doing more than criminal mischief and is actually vying for their parents affection. In surprise twists, the pitiable Yuria revels in being the ogre in response to Mako’s nastiness while the loutish Takuji shows a far more forgiving and generous side, especially to a brother who belittles him on the basis of self-righteous streak a mile wide. More surprises wait in store but as the narrative plods on, the laughs do dry up as the cruelty factor is upped as we see people trapped in a vicious circle of behaviour.
Yoshida takes his time in cementing the sad reality of these unhappy people. His shooting style is unflashy and the locations are humdrum suburbs, the sort of environment that offers no respite from everyday misery. In this way, Yoshida never flinches from showing the hurt the four characters cause each other and his writing convincingly roots it all in the tightness of family bonds, the self-loathing that competition between children breeds, and the general pettiness of human nature. The more convincing part of the film comes with the depiction of the sisters relationship, more-so than the criminal antics of Takuji.
The performance by Keiko Enoue, in her movie debut, as Yuria is quite moving. It aches with equal parts insecurity, shame over her looks – subject of an endless stream of cruel and humiliating humour based on her weight, and jealousy of her younger sister that engenders a scary hatred. She is both weak and fierce with vengefulness and Enoue’s acting can swing us from sympathising with her character to despising her bullying ways. Meanwhile Miwako Kakei manages an equally nuanced role by playing the acting ingénue with aplomb but she elicits sympathy when we see her professional setbacks in trying to crack the movie world and her own humiliations at the hands of Yuria. Their relationship as sisters put me in mind of Junji Sakamoto’s Face (2000), particularly that film’s harrowing opening. I would have preferred Thicker than Water had just been about the women because there is a deeper psychological dimension, though a crude one, that Yoshida finds. But this is him showing common ground between miserable brothers and sisters. Whatever the background, someone in a sibling relationship will feel overshadowed at some point, and that’s where unhappiness begins.
What we get, though, are two stories of bitter and badly damaged relationships. We see the bonds of siblinghood squeeze too tight for the characters to escape each other and their natures too set in stone for them to do anything but hurt each other and the ending offers little hope. This is less an uproarious comedy and more one that will leave you wincing at the pain. The laughs dry up fast and what we are left with is a film about characters who get along like cats or dogs. Or, to use the Japanese title which is the Japanese version of the idiom, dogs 犬 and monkeys 猿.