One of Naruse’s strangest and most riveting films subjects a familiar scenario—a married couple going through a rough patch—to a degree of such microscopic scrutiny that it is rendered new and alien. Hara Setsuko and Sano Shuji play middle-aged partners Fumiko and Ryotaro, a traditionally arranged domestic couple living on the hardscrabble outskirts of Tokyo. They share a brusque rapport that had hardened into mutual contempt long before the events of the script, based on a play by Kishida Kunio, are set in motion, and the early scenes deftly establish the cutting shorthand used by the husband and wife to air their petty domestic grievances. Their prickly relationship is set into relief by the people around them, including their honeymooner niece (Kagawa Kyoko) and new neighbors (Kobayashi Keiju and Negishi Akemi), whose troubles alternately mirror and refract their own. But expectations of cathartic rekindling are brushed aside as Naruse peels back the layers of his characters’ cold exteriors and finds only self-defeating rationales underneath. Hardly a bleak dirge, however, Sudden Rain is instead animated by playful, dreamlike touches, including a persistent use of background piano music whose source offers one of the film’s most surprising, multilayered reveals. – Carson Lund

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