Starring Kanji Furutachi. In Japanese, with English subtitles

Mousily bearded Toshio (Kanji Furutachi) doesn’t say much, whether he’s working in his sheet-metal shop in a quiet corner of Tokyo or having dinner with his neglected wife, Akié (Mariko Tsutsui), and their preteen daughter, Hotaru (Momone Shinokawa). But the family’s fault lines are exposed when we see Dad reading the paper while Mom and daughter say grace.

Of course, their pleasant chat about how certain spiders eat their own mothers could be seen as disconcerting, and even Hotaru’s time spent practising the organlike instrument of the title is a little creepy. It looks plainly domestic while sounding like the soundtrack to a trip to an underground circus.

In the stylish Harmonium, writer-director Kôji Fukada keeps working the Lynchian divide between the normal and the nightmarish, between polite formality and the subterranean id. This dichotomy comes into focus with the abrupt arrival of Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano), one of Toshio’s oldest friends, freshly released from prison. Yasaka is invited to live with the family, with no explanation to the rest of them.

The ex-con did something decidedly not okay, a perversion of “the framework of justice I had built for myself”. With his rigidly upright posture and buttoned-up dress clothes, Yasaka is a hit with Mom and daughter. He presents himself as a compulsive truth-teller. But his presence is that of a quiet snake in what’s already no garden of Eden. And Dad isn’t telling everything, either.

The film’s binary approach cracks things right in the middle, when a new (largely unexplained) crisis happens, and the tale jumps ahead about eight years. Yasaka’s no longer on the scene, but the family is in even deeper peril. Still, Toshio seems much more engaged now. The filmmaker keeps a cool distance, however, and Harmonium wavers between elegantly composed long shots and flights of magic-realistic fancy. It’s a tightly controlled storytelling gambit that pays off, even if Fukada’s off-key tendency to keep messing with the audience grows slightly wearying by the fade-to-black ending.