Behind every successful woman is a disgruntled man insisting that she never would have gotten to where she is without the help of you-know-who.

In Keisuke Yoshida’s “Kami wa Mikaeri o Motomeru” (literally “God expects something in return”), that man is Naoki Tamogami (Tsuyoshi Muro), a mild, middle-aged event worker who starts helping an aspiring YouTuber, only to be cast aside as soon as she gets her first taste of success.

When he first meets Yuri (Yukino Kishii), she’s a hapless wannabe dreaming of the viral video that will rescue her from the drudgery of her call-center job. Naoki doesn’t have much to offer besides some rudimentary video editing skills and a generous supply of goodwill, but she’s grateful for any help she can get.

He soon finds himself acting as her director, producer and sometime costar, making guest appearances in a grubby, lank-haired ogre costume that looks like something out of a preschooler's nightmare. Although the clunky videos they produce together don’t elicit much beyond the odd embarrassed titter, Yuri treats her benefactor with reverence; taking the last kanji character from his surname, she calls him “Kami” (“God”).

It’s all very sweet and innocent until Naoki’s weaselly coworker, Yo (Ryuya Wakaba), introduces Yuri to a popular YouTuber duo who encourage her to upgrade her stodgy aesthetic. With barely a second thought, she turns her back on “God” and puts her faith in a different creator (Shuntaro Yanagi) who quickly sets her on the path to social media stardom.

Already disgruntled about the way he’s been treated, Naoki then finds himself in serious financial trouble, only to get soundly rebuffed when he approaches Yuri for help. Furious, he dons a balaclava and starts posting angry tirades about his former collaborator on YouTube, leading to a flame war that soon spills over into the real world.

Fans of Yoshida’s caustic cinema should know what to expect. The director — who also writes his own scripts — makes the kind of films that you watch through your fingers: His characters are constantly overstepping the mark or getting pushed past the point where they can act rationally.

His latest descent into ignominy is malicious fun, though it’s hard to ignore the mean-spirited tone that pervades the story. As Japan’s movie industry belatedly wakes up to the #MeToo era, this also may not have been the best time for a film about a young woman getting harassed by an older man, in which the audience is encouraged to identify with the victimizer.

As with Yoshida’s stinging sibling drama, “Thicker Than Water” (2018), the film is elevated by savvy casting, giving Muro and Kishii an opportunity to subvert their well-honed screen personas. Muro has particular fun dispensing with his nice-guy image, though he manages to temper his explosions of rage so that they seem more pathetic than scary.

This helps stop his vendetta against Yuri from becoming outright unpleasant to watch, though it’s a close call. The moral murkiness that made last year’s “Intolerance” so engrossing becomes a bit of a liability for Yoshida here.

The director also never quite nails the distinctive aesthetic and vernacular of Japan’s YouTuber culture. Like Naoki, he’s an outsider looking in — shaking his fist from time to time at those blasted kids.

Kami wa Mikaeri o Motomeru
Rating
Run Time105 mins.
LanguageJapanese
OpensNow showing