Image via miff.com.au

Director Yui Kiyohara’s debut feature, Our House, has a quite restraint that adds a lyrical quality to its abstruse narrative.

Seri (Nodoka Kawanishi) lives with her mother (Yukiko Yasuno) in a house near the ocean and struggles to accept her father leaving them and her mother’s new relationship. Overlapping the story is another of two women, Toko (Mei Fujiwara) and Sana (Mariwo Osawa), living in the same house. Toko takes Sana in when she wakes on a ferry with no memory other than her name. The women go about their lives and occasionally hear echoes of the others; perhaps their separate existences are at different times but perhaps they are in parallel. It is never really clear.

There are some plot points – Toko is up to some sort of activist subterfuge, Sana meets a man in a cafe who may be a friend or a foe, Seri wants to put up the Christmas tree that somehow symbolises family life before her father left – but all amount to a rather enigmatic and unsatisfying ending. I feel like I missed something or perhaps this subtle ambiguity was the point.

Have you seen this film? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.