There are films that take you places you rather wish they wouldn't. Within the first 10 minutes of "Siblings of the Cape," I was ready to stop watching, but something about Shinzo Katayama's scruffy, transgressive debut kept me hooked.
While it's hard to give an unconditional recommendation for a movie about a disabled man who starts pimping out his severely autistic sister, Katayama is definitely doing something right here. Working from his own script — and paying out of his own pocket — he shows little interest in staying within the bounds of conventional taste; as depictions of mental disability go, this is closer to Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" than Netflix's "Atypical."
Yoshio (Yuya Matsuura) lives with his younger sister, Mariko (Misa Wada), in a squalid apartment where unwashed dishes fester in the sink and the windows are pasted over with cardboard. When Mariko goes missing, then returns with semen-stained underwear and a ¥10,000 note in her pocket, her brother is initially furious. But after he loses his job at a shipyard and finds himself unable to pay the bills, he starts considering the unthinkable: maybe his little sister could bring in some cash instead.