Corpse disposal is a complicated business even at the best of times. All the more so if you’re as hapless as the eponymous protagonists of “The Brothers Kitaura.” Masaki Tsujino’s sophomore feature, which won the Critics’ Picks Competition at last year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, is a tale of desperation compounded by incompetence and self-interest. When its characters find themselves in over their heads, they keep digging.

At the start of the film, older sibling Sota (Masaaki Nakano) is in a state of arrested development: unemployed, work-shy and still living with his elderly father, Goichi (Taka Takao). He may be in his 40s, but Sota acts like an eternal teen, sleeping in late, getting up to no good when he’s home alone and leaving his dad to do all the cooking. So when the latter threatens to turf him out in favor of a potential marriage partner, the ungrateful son chooses fight over flight, leading to an altercation that ends with Goichi lying dead on the kitchen floor.

Unaccustomed to having to clean up his own mess, Sota enlists the help of his estranged brother, Akira (Hirota Otsuka), who’s already in a bit of a pickle himself. Once the family’s high-flier, the younger Kitaura is now facing personal ruin after an email blunder led to him getting fired for sexual harassment, then served divorce papers by his wife. You’d think he wouldn’t want to add “accessory to murder” to his list of problems, but he’s more concerned about his job prospects than doing the right thing. I mean, who’s going to hire the brother of a convicted killer, right?