‘Horizon’: Ethical dilemma makes for muted drama

Laying the dead to rest is a delicate business. For Shingo Iguchi (Pierre Taki), the stone-faced protagonist of Katsuya Kobayashi’s “Horizon,” it involves hitching a ride on a fishing boat with a cooler containing bags of cremated remains, which he carefully consigns to the ocean.

As funerary rites go, it’s a more economical alternative to interring ashes at a cemetery. However, a potential customer is probably lowballing him when she offers a crumpled ¥10,000 note and a couple of candies as payment.

While Shingo goes about his work with an appropriate sense of dignity, he’s otherwise your archetypal middle-aged slob. He spends his evenings out drinking and leaves all the cooking and housework to his daughter, Nao (Aino Kuribayashi).

The latter works an unglamorous job at a seafood processing plant and betrays little discernible ambition to improve her lot. Shingo still treats her like a kid, but she seems to be staying in the family nest mostly out of loyalty to her late mother, who died in the tsunami triggered by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake.

This is Fukushima, you see: The waters in which Shingo scatters people’s ashes have already provided a grave to thousands of others. And that poses a professional dilemma when he’s approached by a troubled young man (Shintaro Yuya) bearing his brother’s remains.

The customer has the necessary funds, though not the requisite burial certificate. The reasons for that become clear when Shingo is subsequently contacted by a journalist, Eda (Tomomitsu Adachi), who tells him the deceased was a mass murderer — and demands to know what he plans to do with the ashes.

When Shingo brushes him off, Eda orchestrates an emotive meeting with a parent of one of the killer’s victims, a video of which goes viral.

From there, the ripples spread. The local fishermen aren’t too happy about having their produce potentially tainted by association (don’t tell them what’s been happening over at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant). Nao is also furious at Shingo’s insistence that all ashes are equal, which she interprets as indifference about the fate of her mother, whose body was never recovered.

There’s interesting material here, but it can feel like Takashi Saito’s original script — like the unscrupulous Eda — is trying too hard to manufacture drama. The most effective scenes are generally more quotidian, following Shingo as he goes about his daily life. A subplot in which one of Nao’s coworkers teaches her that no good deed goes unpunished is also nicely played.

Kobayashi, an actor making his directorial debut, opts for a naturalistic approach, making frequent use of handheld camerawork in imagery that vacillates between atmospheric and underlit. He gives his cast plenty of space to do their thing; too bad you can’t always see them.

The director and his star first met on the set of Kazuya Shiraishi’s “The Devil’s Path” (2013), which gave Taki one of the juiciest roles of his career. The subdued stoicism the actor displays during “Horizon” is less riveting, though it’s given added resonance by his real-life tabloid troubles and subsequent career comeback.

It’s hard not to root for Shingo when he tells his journalist antagonist that enough is enough, and self-appointed moral guardians shouldn’t rush to judgment. Let he who is without sin cast the first bone.