‘Domains’: Hypnotic and truly original

Some films seem to arrive at just the right moment. When Natsuka Kusano’s “Domains” first appeared on the streaming service Mubi in March 2020 after screening at a handful of festivals, it resonated uncannily with a world adjusting to the new reality of COVID-19 lockdowns.

The film, which is finally getting a proper theatrical release in Japan, would be a striking piece of cinema in any year. It exists in the hybrid space between fiction and nonfiction filmmaking, mixing elements of documentary and drama to create something truly original. On one level, it’s a deconstructed murder mystery in which the question isn’t so much “whodunnit” as “why.” However, Kusano has other ends in mind.

An outline of the story would go something like this: Aki (Asami Shibuya), a youngish woman on leave from her job at a publishing company in Tokyo, returns to her hometown in a nearby prefecture and reconnects with childhood friend Nodoka (Tomo Kasajima). The latter is now married and raising a 3-year-old daughter, Honoka. But her husband, Naoto (Tomomitsu Adachi), is cold and controlling, while the seemingly perfect home in which they live strikes Aki as oppressive.

Although she hits it off with the young Honoka, her relationship with Naoto quickly becomes more adversarial. He starts to view Aki as a malign influence, speaking of her as if she were a source of contagion that might infect his family. She in turn appears to see him as a threat to the intimate kinship that she enjoys — or, perhaps, merely used to enjoy — with Nodoka.

This is all spelled out during the first scene, in which Aki listens impassively while an interrogator reads back her testimony confessing to the murder of the couple’s child. It’s a tantalizing opener, in which the facts are laid on the table yet something vital seems to have been withheld.

However, the film contained in the rest of Tomoyuki Takahashi’s script is left to exist mostly in the viewer’s mind. For much of the remainder of the 150-minute running time, what we see isn’t a dramatic enactment but rather the actors rehearsing their roles.

Scenes are repeated, with varying levels of emotional shading and sometimes a few extra lines of dialogue. It’s both ponderous and strangely hypnotic. The camera lingers on Shibuya and Kasajima as they react, each eye movement or shift in emphasis offering a hint of — well, what exactly?

Screenwriter Takahashi has previously worked with Ryusuke Hamaguchi, including on the director’s “Happy Hour” (2015). However, “Domains” more closely resembles the rehearsal scenes from Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” (2021), in which an international cast works on a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.”

Like that film, Kusano is interested in how performances are constructed, although her actors also seem to be striving to find something that isn’t in the script — as if they might make sense of the senseless act of violence at the heart of the story.

Viewers with the patience to stick with “Domains” may come away feeling that they’ve found an answer. But as the director herself stated in an interview when the film screened at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 2019, sometimes it’s OK not to understand. Either way, the realms she explores here are fascinating places to spend a few hours.