Hush!, the latest feature from Japanese director Ryosuke Hashiguchi, opens with a scene that will seem all-too-familiar to many members of the Frameline audience: a naked man wakes up in a stranger's bed, searches the cluttered floor for the clothes he carelessly discarded the night before, and tries to make a quick exit before his host wakes up.

When he gets caught sneaking out, hand­ some but closeted Katsuhiro (Seiichi Tanabe) doesn't even wait around long enough to get his date's cell phone number, and filmmaker Hashiguchi (A Touch of Fever, Like Grains of Sand) rushes right along with him. Without pausing for the usual introductions or exposition, Hashiguchi plunges us into the separate worlds of Katsuhiro, his equally handsome date, Naoya (Kazuya Takahashi), and Asako (Reiko Katanoka), the depressed, disaffected loner who decides to push her way into their lives. At first, these three — two partners in an anonymous one-night stand and a woman they have never even met — seem to have little in common. But Asako is determined to make the men into her de facto family, particularly since she sees some­ thing in Katsuhiro that she needs: a father for her children. "You don't choose your family," Naoya's outraged mother tells Asako in a cli­mactic confrontation, "they're just there." But as Hush! proves, the family that is "there" isn't always the one you want, or need. In the end, the family you choose is the one that really mat­ ters.