An earthquake bird is a rare bird that is only heard in the silence that follows the tremors of an earthquake. The new thriller distributed by Netflix in collaboration with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, Earthquake Bird, starring Alicia Vikander, Naoki Kobayashi, and Riley Keough, is in movie theaters in the U.K. from November 1, and will become available on Netflix globally from November 15.
Based on the prize-winning novel by Susanna Jones, Earthquake Bird was adapted and directed by Wash Westmoreland, the British director of Oscar-winning Still Alice (2014). Set in 1989 Tokyo, Earthquake Bird opens with the news that the police have found unidentified body parts, which could be those of a young American woman, Lily Bridges (played by Riley Keough), who was reported missing. The police take in Lucy Fly (played by Alicia Vikander) for questioning. Lucy is a Swedish translator who identifies with the Japanese way of living after five years in Tokyo.
Under suspicion, Lucy tells the detectives of her intense relationship with Teiji (played by Naoki Kobayashi), a dashing young photographer she met on the street as he took her picture, and how their relationship was soon under threat with the arrival of Lily, an extroverted, care-free young American who has just moved to Tokyo, leaving her job as a nurse back home. Lucy’s story is told through flashbacks as she confesses to the detectives everything that has happened in her life since she met Teiji. Playing a translator, Vikander had to deliver a flawless Japanese, especially in these interrogation scenes which are entirely in Japanese.
Death follows her around, Lucy keeps saying. With this ominous statement, the mood of the film is set. Alicia Vikander portrays an introverted Lucy, rendering her a very intriguing character. Lucy is hiding a dark and mysterious past, which will slowly resurface as she recounts her story. Teiji is just as mysterious. Claiming that he only photographs abstract shapes, when in fact, as Lucy soon finds out, he photographs women he’s attracted to. Not much is revealed of Lily’s character other than the stereotypical young American expat.
There is a sense that the film tries to blur the line between reality and fiction through Lucy’s narrative in the psychological thriller tradition. Lucy isn’t an unreliable narrator as such, in that she herself is clearly confused. “We all live in our own worlds,” the detective says to her at one point. It feels as if this is what the film was trying to convey throughout, but without quite managing it. The film never fully delves into its protagonist’s psyche. The film tries to show Lucy’s perspective on reality, but becomes as muddled as the protagonist toward the end. Images from her past keep popping up, but it is done in a way that is completely puzzling. There is an issue with the temporality of the film. Was she seeing these images at the time of the events, or as she is recounting everything to the detectives? Since the film is really Lucy’s memory of the events that unfolded as she tells the detectives, the film confuses this distinction.
Earthquake Bird begins as a murder mystery to then reveal itself within the realm of the psychological thriller. The cinematography–by Chung Chung-Hoon, the cinematographer of Old Boy and The Handmaiden–in its autumnal colors and dark tones, adds the aesthetics of a neo-noir film. It is reminiscent of the style of Ridley Scott’s own films from that period, most notably Black Rain (1989), a clip of which appears at the beginning of Earthquake Bird.
Earthquake Bird is an intriguing and atmospheric thriller in that it achieves to create a dark and mysterious mood that is familiar to this genre. It had all the right ingredients, with a good story, and yet ultimately the ending disappoints.
