While he's perhaps best known for directing the original Pulse, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's new film, Tokyo Sonata, is an unexpected pleasure -- not only because it's a departure from the J-horror films that made his name, but because it's also a startlingly rich, funny and strong drama, without a hint of the supernatural or unearthly. That's not to say it's not exciting, or scary or startling, but rather to say that it concerns itself with normal, average (which is hardly normal, and rarely average) life as its main concern. Ryhuei (Teruyuki Kagawa) is a chief administrator in a medical-supplies company ... or, rather, he was; he's been downsized, his position outsourced. He can't bring himself to tell his wife, Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), and has even less an idea of what he'd say to his sons Takashi (Yu Koyangi) and Kenji (Kai Inowaki), so for a while he dresses for work, leaves in the morning and goes to the park. Or looks for new work that simply isn't there.

At heart, Tokyo Sonata is about the difficulty of necessary conversations, and the necessity of difficult conversations. Ryhuei isn't the only person not talking about what's really going on; Megumi's deeply unhappy in her life, for reasons she can't even explain to herself; Takashi is thinking about embarking on a bold, if ill-advised, adventure; Kenji wants to study the piano, and does so in secret after his father's dismissal of the idea. Watching some films, you think that the plot's complications and character's stresses could be cleared up in one simple conversation ... and watching other, better films, you think that the plot's complications and character's stresses could be cleared up in one simple conversation and think of all the times that's been the case in your own life and how you may have failed to do so at the time, too.

Certain movies get under my skin and refuse to leave. Case in point: Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure and Pulse (AKA Kairo). There are several startling scenes in those movies that left me on edge for days. Both are horror flicks, but differ in their approaches. Cure is a police procedural with an unsettling string of deaths, while Pulse imagines what happens when there is no more room in the spirit realm for dead people. Kurosawa has a gift for creating indelible imagery married to sometimes head-scratching stories. Even when things don't really add up, as in Bright Future, his films leave a distinct aftertaste.

Kurosawa's Retribution, from 2006, hit Region 1 DVD earlier this week, and it's an odd little beast. In the opening scene, a woman in a red dress is brutally drowned by a mysterious man in a shallow pool of salt water on a reclaimed piece of land near the ocean. Kôji Yakusho (Babel, Shall We Dance?) plays Yoshioka, a weary police detective (similar to the one he played in Cure) investigating the case. Before he can get too far, we witness a respected doctor kill his son, for little apparent reason, by the same method. Is the doctor a serial killer? Why are Yoshioka's fingerprints on the first victim's body? Why does Yoshioka start having nightmares about a woman in a red dress?

Deliberately paced, Retribution veers between an effective freak-out and a disappointing, frustrating mystery, but Kurosawa fans may want to check out its low-key artistic despair.