A couple of bleak films this weekend at the cinema: The new film Harmonium and Fassbinder’s Fox and his Friends (1975). If you want laughs, go somewhere else. I had no idea that I would be seeing two bleak films in succession this weekend but there you go, life’s full of surprises. So to focus on Harmonium, directed by Koji Fukada, this is a quietly engrossing film which I can best describe as an arthouse version of The Guest. Or The Guest with more subtlety. A man from the past with a mysterious history inveigles his way into the lives of a quiet family. And that’s all I should say, but what I liked about it was the way it’s a story told through the build-up of little details that gradually create a picture that is less than pleasant. It’s the gaps in the story that imply so much, so that the viewer is left to put the pieces together.