‘Drive Into Night’: Middle age doldrums take a turn toward the bizarre

Midlife crises can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. Some people quit their jobs, buy fancy cars, or take up with younger lovers. The really unlucky ones go out for a few drinks with a co-worker one evening and wake up the next day with a corpse in their trunk.

Such is the quandary facing Taichi Akimoto (Tomomitsu Adachi), the hapless protagonist of Dai Sako’s twisty and confounding “Drive Into Night.” He’s on the wrong side of 40 but still lives with his parents, and has a thankless job as a salesman for a metalworks factory, endlessly cold-calling companies to see if they have any scrap iron.

“What makes life fun for you?” asks co-worker Wataru Taniguchi (Reo Tamaoki) as the pair unwind at a local bar. Taichi can only reply: “Not much.”

As they’re heading home, they run into a young saleswoman who stopped by at their factory earlier that day and convince her to join them for a few more rounds.

After rebuffing both men’s advances, the unfortunate woman ends up dead, though the details are left deliberately murky. Things get murkier still when the police start investigating her disappearance, only to start pointing the finger at the factory’s manager, Shinichi Hongo (Tsutomu Takahashi), who was seen with her earlier the same night.

For the first hour or so, “Drive Into Night” plays like a slow-burn rural noir, as if a young Coen Brothers had been transplanted to the hinterlands of suburban Japan. Then it reaches a fork in the road and starts heading somewhere altogether weirder, as Taichi is inducted into a Scientology-style cult led by a charismatic guru (Shohei Uno) who calls himself a “new life designer.”

Things get increasingly bizarre after that. The movie hurtles toward an ambiguous ending that raises more questions than it answers, the first and foremost being: What the heck is Sako playing at here?

At first blush, there’s little to connect “Drive Into Night” with the director’s previous feature, death-row drama “The Chaplain” (2018), save for the contrast-heavy visuals and sickly, desaturated palette. However, if you can keep up with the film’s narrative contortions, it has plenty to say about personal responsibility: There’s a moral message lurking within the madness.

Few of the characters in this tale come out well. Wataru and his wife, Misaki (the single-named Nahana), are both having extramarital affairs, at the expense of looking after their young daughter. In one of the film’s cruelest jokes, a corpse gets treated as just another piece of scrap to be disposed of — for the right price, of course.

Sako’s comic flourishes don’t always hit the mark, and there are some unfortunate missteps. Perhaps the most egregious is a Chinese character known as Wan (played by Japanese actor Motohiro Niina), who, with his thick accent and Gucci fanny pack, is the crudest kind of ethnic stereotype. Why do directors still think this kind of thing is OK? And can they please cut it out?

“Drive Into Night” also suffers from tonal wobbles and glaring plot holes, though such things are easier to forgive in this careening joyride of a film. Even as it veers wildly in the road and threatens to plunge off a cliff, it’s quite a trip.