The weight of tradition threatens to crush a once-great family in "The Nikaidos' Fall," a contemporary drama about people with an unhealthy fixation on the past. Iranian director Ida Panahandeh's film starts in a cemetery and never really leaves the realm of the dead. Its characters are so haunted by a sense of obligation to their forebears, they're incapable of living for themselves.
Tatsuya Nikaido (Masaya Kato) is the patriarch of the titular clan, and a man whose time passed a few centuries ago. He looks like he'd be happier in a kimono than the suits and overalls he's required to wear for work at the family seed business, strutting through each scene with the bearing of a kabuki actor who's just removed his makeup.
In the elegant country home that he shares with his ailing mother, Haru (Kazuko Shirakawa), and daughter, Yuko (Shizuka Ishibashi), the photos of departed relatives maintain a stern watch over the living. As Yuko tells a visitor while showing off the family annals: "All the dead people in this book are waiting for my Dad to do something."