There’s something sinister happening in Oiso, a dead-end town on the Pacific coast, though good luck deducing what it is from Takuya Misawa’s “The Murders of Oiso.” Running at a pithy 79 minutes but in no hurry to get anywhere, this artfully inscrutable rural noir keeps teasing you to imagine the awful things that might be happening just off screen.
While the director’s debut, “Chigasaki Story” (2014), was a whimsical homage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, his second feature owes more to the fractured narratives of Nicolas Roeg. This Japan-South Korea-Hong Kong co-production deflects you at every turn, and while some (this viewer included) will treat it as a riddle waiting to be solved, others are liable to find the whole thing maddeningly oblique.
The story revolves around a quartet of old high-school friends — Shun (Koji Moriya), Tomoki (Haya Nakazaki), Eita (Shugo Nagashima) and Kazuya (Yusaku Mori) — who now work for the construction company owned by the Kazuya’s family. They’re still young men, but it seems like the best years of their lives are already behind them. When they aren’t working, which is most of the time, they’re off smoking, playing cards or committing the odd act of low-level thuggery, in a society where everybody appears to be on the take.
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