There are films that take you places you rather wish they wouldn¡¯t. Within the first 10 minutes of ¡°Siblings of the Cape,¡± I was ready to stop watching, but something about Shinzo Katayama¡¯s scruffy, transgressive debut kept me hooked.
While it¡¯s hard to give an unconditional recommendation for a movie about a disabled man who starts pimping out his severely autistic sister, Katayama is definitely doing something right here. Working from his own script ¡ª and paying out of his own pocket ¡ª he shows little interest in staying within the bounds of conventional taste; as depictions of mental disability go, this is closer to Lars von Trier¡¯s ¡°The Idiots¡± than Netflix¡¯s ¡°Atypical.¡±
Yoshio (Yuya Matsuura) lives with his younger sister, Mariko (Misa Wada), in a squalid apartment where unwashed dishes fester in the sink and the windows are pasted over with cardboard. When Mariko goes missing, then returns with semen-stained underwear and a ?10,000 note in her pocket, her brother is initially furious. But after he loses his job at a shipyard and finds himself unable to pay the bills, he starts considering the unthinkable: maybe his little sister could bring in some cash instead.
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