“Miserabilist cinema” sounds like a pejorative term, as in “movies that wallow in misery,” but it can be an honest description. Some films, the good ones included, focus on characters in the throes of hopelessness and despair — that is, people experiencing the misery of existence to the brim.
One of their makers is Nobuteru Uchida, whose debut feature “Love Addiction” (2010), a drama about a turbulent love quadrangle, won the Tokyo Filmex festival’s Grand Prize.
His latest, “The Women,” inflicts so much awfulness on its protagonist that it starts to feel like directorial sadism. Or, like a contemporary Japanese version of the biblical Book of Job, minus God.