Japan's image overseas might have a funhouse aspect, but even many outlanders who live here only get a selective view of the place, since their Japanese colleagues and friends mostly come from the educated, middle-class stratum of society and live more or less stable, law-abiding lives.

Mipo Oh's third feature, "Soko Nomi Nite Hikari Kagayaku (The Light Shines Only There)," shows a different stratum, one made up of an underclass living close to the edge — or over it. But has the talented Oh gone over the line herself this time? Filmed in the grittier parts of Hokkaido, in shades of pollution-haze brown and dirty-window gray, "Soko Nomi Nite Hikari Kagayaku" is relentlessly dorodoro, a hard-to-translate if perfectly apt word that signifies a dark, endless swamp of emotional turmoil. From beginning to end, the film is replete with lonely alcoholic binges and loveless, even brutal sex, while family life is portrayed as a pit of grinding poverty, hopeless illness and crazy-making despair.

Yasushi Sato, the author of the 1989 novel on which the film is based, committed suicide at age 41 in 1990. Was his "light that shines only there" not of this life, but the next?