Lily Franky, left, and Kairi Jyo in Shoplifters (Magnolia Pictures)

 The latest from Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda (After the Storm) is a moving drama focusing on characters who live on society’s periphery. Here they take center stage. The opening scene, which is set in an unnamed Japanese city, features a middle-aged man, Osamu (Lily Franky), and a shaggy-haired youth, Shota (Kairi Jyo), stealing items from a supermarket. They utilize reflective metal surfaces, hand signals, and the placement of their bodies to fool the store’s employees. They have clockwork timing—it’s clear the pair have been working together for a while.

On the way home, Osamu and Shota pass an apartment building, where they notice a little girl (Miyu Sasaki) locked out in the freezing cold. They bring her back to the hovel they share with Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), Osamu’s wife; another young woman, Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), who they claim is Nobuyo’s sister, though the women look decidedly unrelated; and the grandmotherly Hatsue (Kirin Kiki). The space is cramped and filled with junk, yet they somehow make enough space for everyone, including the newcomer, whose name is Yuri, to gather together for dinner.

Over the course of the evening, the group discovers that the girl has been badly abused, which leads to a moment in which everyone stops to consider the situation. On the one hand, they could get the police involved, but that would bring unwanted attention onto them, which they do not want for reasons that we initially assume have to do with Osamu and Shota’s thieving. After dinner, Osamu and Nobuyo carry Yuri back to where the former found her, whereupon they discover she will probably be abused again by her parents.

Shoplifters is a film about characters who engage in all kinds of illegal activities, but they aren’t immoral. On the contrary, they try very hard to be good to one another. It makes a case that a real family is not made up the people we are born into but those who care for us and vice versa. As the narrative unfolds, the exact circumstances that brought everyone together are revealed in full, and these revelations range from fascinating to the genuinely shocking. But what is clear is that at one point in the past, each member of this makeshift family was more or less abandoned by the persons closest to them.

The group takes in Yuri, which alters their dynamic significantly. The adults tell Shota that if anyone asks, he should say she is his sister and that they have always been a family of six. Osamu starts to bring Yuri along on his and Shota’s shoplifting runs, although she lacks the experience to be anything besides a lookout. The transitory period seems hardest on the boy, as he has gotten used to being in a two-person team with Osamu and basking in their male-bonding time together. This leads to quite possibly the most heart-warming scene, in which Shota runs off in a huff, and Yuri stays up all night awaiting his return.

It is impossible to overstate the effect Yuri’s arrival has on the household. During the aforementioned scene, as the adults watch her sitting vigil near the apartment entranceway, Nobuyo expresses amazement at the girl’s capacity to care about someone else, despite what she’s been through. Everyone takes turns falling in love with her, which in turn, leads to a brief interval in which they are one big, happy family unit. Ironically, it is that same emotional bonding that threatens to undo everything, as eventually Shota starts to question whether life as a petty thief is what’s right for Yuri.

Kore-eda has long displayed a gift for finding the humanity in his characters, the deadbeat-dad/degenerate-gambler protagonist of After the Storm being a prime example. He does so again in Shoplifters, beginning with Osamu, who on the one hand is shady and conniving. On the rare occasions that he goes out to do legitimate construction work, he is constantly looking for ways to obtain an injury in order to collect worker’s comp. One could compare him to Fagin from Oliver Twist, in how he puts children to work as his accomplices, but a key difference is that he seems incapable of hurting them, especially Shota, whom he treats like a real son. The fact Osamu holds out hope that the boy will one day call him father—and that he feels he must earn that privilege—makes him surprisingly endearing.

The women are also multidimensional and compelling, especially Nobuyo, who works dead-end jobs that pay minimum wage. She seems convincingly worn down at the start of the film. However, the opportunity to be a maternal figure to Yuri rejuvenates her, and the transformation between her first appearance—when she complains about having another mouth to feed—and her latter self is nothing short of remarkable to behold. It’s great acting, culminating in a post-coital scene with Osamu in which she’s downright radiant.

Another well-rounded character is Hatsue, who follows in the footsteps of the grandmother in After the Storm, whom Kiki also played as saintly on the surface, but not as a simpleton. Though at first we wonder if she is being taken advantage of by this shady couple—as well as Aki, since she allows all of them to stay in her home without paying any rent—that turns out to be anything but the reality. Indeed, one of the most dryly amusing scenes involves her invading (there’s no other word for it) an affluent family’s home and playing on their expectations of her as doddering old woman. It isn’t the first time that she reveals a calculating side.

This latest outing by Kore-eda is less overtly stylish than his last film, the legal procedural The Third Murder, but given that it’s a more character-driven work, it’s a fitting approach. The director still demonstrates his mastery of the medium, including a lengthy tracking shot in the first scene, which follows Osamu and Shota as they case the joint they’re planning to steal from. There’s also a tense foot chase scored to heightened strings, featuring back-and-forth cuts between pursuer and pursued. It packs a significant emotional wallop because we know the emotional states of the protagonists leading up to this scene. The ending, which resembles a procedural in tone and style, also delivers quite the gut punch.

Osamu and Nobuyo certainly make mistakes as parents—along with teaching the children to shoplift, they also keep them out of school. Yet for all of its imperfections, this highly unconventional family is depicted as caring and nurturing. Although the final shot offers no guarantees, it does contain the hope that the good times we experience in life—as fleeting as they may be—can sustain us through the bad ones to come. It’s a noble coda, and not at all surprising coming from one of the most humane filmmakers working today.