Hikikomori is the Japanese term for total social withdrawal, and by some counts it affects a million young men who have shut themselves in their rooms, sometimes for years. Director Phil Rees goes into the homes where this is happening, including one where a 17-year-old has taken over the family kitchen, refusing to leave it or speak to outsiders for four years while his parents cook on a camping stove in what is left of their own house. Western psychologists interviewed for the film call the condition an epidemic, though they admit how little is actually understood about its causes. Rees talks to parents who hide their children's condition rather than seek help, a silence the film treats as part of the problem, tied to the shame attached to failure in Japanese family life. The film stays close to individual households rather than offering broad theories, building its picture of the phenomenon out of the daily, grinding specifics of what withdrawal looks like from inside one family's kitchen.