By Kimberly Chun

Photo courtesy of IFC Films

On its surface, the film possesses all the hallmarks of a gentle domestic drama in the mode of Yasujiro Ozu: the tatami mat-level cameras, the patience required to capture still, meaningful pauses, and his close attention to everyday household details and the emotions they trigger. But if you dispense with the need for the gratuitous jolts of stateside revamps like The Grudge, Nobody Knows can also easily check in as the latest quiet, realist addition to a pack of Japanese chillers that revolve around a contemporary urban culture's deteriorating familial support systems, in which single parents are barely equipped to cope with child care let alone a supernatural crisis (Ringu, Dark Water) and pressurized family units implode violently (Ju-On, Séance).

Shadowy concrete corridors, mysterious damp spots, and shabby prefab kitchens are the sites and stuff of nightmares in these films, becoming, in Nobody Knows and particularly Dark Water, "evil dead traps" (to borrow the title of the J-horror flick) hinged on a culture's anxiety over modernization, its ghostly discontents, and its despair over its innocent victims. Domestic dramas cross a threshold into terror when wracked by forces beyond its players' control – be it an evil spirit or a careless parent.

In Nobody Knows the damage is relatively bloodless, its shocks are depth-charge subtle, and it serves up absolutely no roller-coaster ride of suspense. Instead the director of Maborosi and After Life brings a solemn, gut-level empathy and intimacy to a tale based on the real-life 1988 "affair of the four abandoned children of Nishi-Sugamo," in which a mother deserted her kids, who were each born of a different father, never educated, and who in fact didn't legally exist because their births were never recorded. Working with amateur child actors for almost a year and editing as he filmed, Kore-eda suffuses the story with a vérité lightness and handheld intimacy when it could easily have been overshadowed by sensation. This is horror with a human face, striking a reverberant note ordinarily found in fairy tales and adventure stories. At moments Nobody Knows feels as if a Maysles had hid out with youngsters secreted away by the Pied Piper.

Its four young protagonists, ages 5 to 12 – Akira (Yuya Yagira, who took the best actor prize at Cannes last year), Kyoko (Ayu Kitaura), Shigeru (Hiei Kimura), and Yuki (Momoko Shimizu) – have a home, shoe box-y and cinder block-like as it is, but they might as well be homeless once they are abandoned by their mother, Keiko (former J-pop vocalist and TV personality You). Moving in with only one "legit" child, Akira, Keiko smuggles in another two in suitcases and makes them promise to never go out, not even on the veranda. And the children dutifully obey even after she disappears, full of cutesy baby talk about a promising beau who is unaware of her brood. Twelve-year-old Akira struggles to keep the family together, buying his younger siblings little presents and tempted by other boys' PlayStations as he carefully counts the dwindling cash left by his mother, the power goes out, and chaos falls on the children's tiny apartment world.

Nobody Knows pivots on, though it refuses to overplay, its eerie contrasts: the ditzy and probably deranged woman-child of a mother who won't grow up; an overwhelmed eldest son forced to become an adult; and the rest of the immobilized kids, stuck in suspended animation in a 41-square-meter box, like goldfish in a bowl. Hungry for structure and eager to follow a parent's rules, they nearly starve to death rather than break form, with Shigeru chewing on paper to satiate his pangs and Akira hitting up their supposed baby daddies for handouts.

Even as it empathizes with a mother who might charitably be described as "free-spirited," Nobody Knows appears to issue an urgent cry to a return to the traditional Japanese values that buttressed Ozu's ironclad families, stay-at-home moms, and well-fed chubby-cheeked children. But to his credit, Kore-eda resists easy answers: the would-be father figures are more reluctant to assist the children than their absent mother is, and though neighbors catch sight of these "undocumented" children, affluent bystanders never disrupt convention and ask the questions that would violate codes of propriety and help the kids. "Nobody knows" because nobody cares – to undermine the comforts of polite, peaceful obliviousness.

It's also telling that these soul-searching, soulful family horror movies, the anxious product of a Japan that has wrestled with recession for years, after the bust of its bubble economy, strike a chord in the States, struggling with its own lousy, post-bubble economy and emerging identity crisis. And identifying with these waifs is effortless when the performances are this strong – particularly in the case of Yagira, who grew taller and whose voice deepened as the shooting progressed. Whereas pure-scare, ambition-free horror sends you crawling back to the solace of the familiar, this genuinely affecting masterpiece pulls you, like the best social realism à la The Bicycle Thief, toward others: you're ready to slip between the cracks alongside these lost souls.

'Nobody Knows' opens Fri/18, Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, S.F.; and Act I and II, 2128 Center, Berk. See Movie Clock for show times.