Earth­quake Bird

A few min­utes into Earth­quake Bird, Ali­cia Vikander’s Lucy Fly is shown trans­lat­ing an Eng­lish-lan­guage film into Japan­ese for what we soon learn has been her job in Tokyo for a num­ber of years. The film in ques­tion is Black Rain, Rid­ley Scott’s cross-cul­tur­al action movie in which Michael Dou­glas and Andy Gar­cia play New York City cops escort­ing a Yakuza mem­ber back to Japan for extradition.

It’s a cute nod giv­en that Scott Free Pro­duc­tions is one of the com­pa­nies behind this Net­flix-dis­trib­uted film, and that Black Rain opened in 1989, the year in which Earth­quake Bird is set. But the ref­er­ence ends up back­fir­ing. While the gen­er­al con­sen­sus on Scott’s film remains large­ly neg­a­tive, not least due to its use of Asian stereo­types, many of its detrac­tors have nonethe­less point­ed to the director’s styl­is­tic excess­es as a pos­i­tive. By con­trast, Wash Westmoreland’s adap­ta­tion of Susan­na Jones’ 2001 nov­el is a pedes­tri­an thriller lack­ing any zest or flair.

This is despite the efforts of DoP Chung Chung-hoon (The Hand­maid­en) and Atti­cus Ross, one of three cred­it­ed com­posers. In front of the cam­era, usu­al­ly reli­able leads floun­der. While Vikan­der deliv­ers her Japan­ese dia­logue with great assur­ance, her per­for­mance is oth­er­wise restrained to the point of lethar­gy – not an ide­al sce­nario for a love tri­an­gle-ori­ent­ed psy­cho­sex­u­al thriller.

The sto­ry sees Lucy ques­tioned by Tokyo police over the dis­ap­pear­ance of ex-pat friend Lily (Riley Keough), who is pre­sumed to have been mur­dered. Lucy is eva­sive with the detec­tives but recounts how she came to be in a rela­tion­ship with a mys­te­ri­ous pho­tog­ra­ph­er, Tei­ji (Nao­ki Kobayashi), who was sym­pa­thet­ic to her trag­ic past, and how the arrival of the more upbeat and care­free Lily drove a wedge between them.

Lucy’s rec­ol­lec­tions are not to be tak­en at face val­ue, but the film’s super­fi­cial psy­cho­log­i­cal prob­ing pre­vents us from becom­ing too wrapped up in pro­ceed­ings. There’s a con­spic­u­ous lack of ten­sion, both in terms of the mur­der mys­tery and the cen­tral romance. On an ear­ly date of sorts, Lucy and Tei­ji take shel­ter togeth­er in a con­fined space dur­ing a brief earth­quake, but the chem­istry between Vikan­der and Kobayashi lacks the intend­ed seis­mic intensity.