Generally speaking, I don’t enjoy foreign films. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate getting a taste of different cultures, but when I’m watching a movie I like to catch on to the small nuances and gestures in a character’s face. I like to hear the inflection in their delivery. This becomes impossible when reading subtitles throughout the film.

However, like any critic should, I went to Tokyo Sonata with an open mind. By the end, I had a different view of foreign films. In this particular one, it was easy to catch the subtleties as well as the meaning behind the dialogue, despite it being in Japanese.

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa has become renowned for his horror films such as Cure and Pulse. In his newest film, Tokyo Sonata, he once again delves into a terrifying world. However, this particular horror film doesn’t involve chainsaws or machine guns, instead it’s a much more realistic scary movie: family life.

The movie begins with the father of the Sasaki family, Ryhuei, being laid off from his job as chief administrator in a medical supplies company. Unable to tell his wife, Megumi, and with even less of an idea how to face the shame of telling his two sons, Ryhuei begins to spend his days sitting in the park. Along the way, he meets Kanji Tsuda, another fired employee who guides him in how to keep up the facade of a working man.

Megumi plays the role of submissive housewife, with the weight of holding her family together slowly pushing her over the edge. Because she is incapable of explaining to even herself why she has grown so unhappy with life, she keeps quiet about her underlying frustration.

The two sons of the Sasaki family choose opposite paths in life, both of which were forbidden by their father. Older brother Takashi enlists in the American army. While younger brother Kenji begins piano lessons a with piano teacher struggling with her own failures.

My favorite part of the movie was building relationships with each character. Watching a family whose struggles mimic many of the people around you helps build sympathy for everything they’re going through. For example, Ryhuei is often portrayed as the overbearing father to his sons, but in other scenes, you witness him coping with his own failure and feeling the shame of not being able to support the people relying on him. In these contrasting moments you understand the pride and superiority he feels he must keep over his younger son after making mistakes with his older son.

We also step outside the Sasaki family and connect with the piano teacher and Kenji’s schoolteacher. Later in the movie, we also encounter a thief who gives far more than he takes. These people form the web around the lives of the main family, and show the ripple effect of the family’s struggles on the people around them.

I left the theater knowing that everything and nothing had turned out okay. The characters each come to an individual conclusion, but still feel separated. It’s the true ending so rarely portrayed in family dramas that makes the closing so distinctive. It was after considering this that I realized that the family’s lives and problems are universal, and their foreign originality make no difference. Not only is the family structure similar, but the secrets, deception, hopelessness and self-deprecation all describe the majority of struggling families, not just in Japan or in our country, but all over the world.