Rent Hanging Garden (2005)

Before Kiyoshi Kurosawa's 'Tokyo Sonata', Kore'eda's 'Still Walking' and Sion Sono's 'Noriko's Dinner Table', there was Toshiaki Toyoda's 'Hanging Garden', the film that started it all. Family as a nightmare and a fount of terror, discord and disquiet. A visually stunning and surreal tale of desperate times, in which we feel the pressure of things unspoken rippling through an unusual 20th-century Japanese family. This family lives in an old-fashioned high-rise apartment and housewife Eriko (Kyôko Koizumi) keeps a small garden on their balcony. They are supposed to have no secrets among each other, and Eriko is obsessed with keeping that rule. But one day, secrets start revealing themselves.