Earthquake Bird is a 2019 drama about a translator with a dark past who is brought in for questioning after an ex-pat friend ends up missing and presumed dead.
It’s 1989 and Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) is a translator living in Japan. She is quiet and isolated, knowing the culture and people well, eventually meeting a photographer named Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi), who is open yet mysterious. She is almost hypnotically drawn to him and follows him to his secluded studio where a minor earthquake has them huddled in the dark. Soon, Lucy befriends Lily (Riley Keough), an ex-pat having some trouble getting her footing in a foreign land who then becomes entangled in the relationship. Some time later, police arrive at Lucy’s office and take her in for questioning, believing she is involved in Lilly disappearance and possible death.
Opening with investigators hauling the solemn-looking Lucy to the station, the story flashes back to a number of intertwining encounters that follow Lucy’s relationships with some key people. While this might seem like the makings for a tense on-the-run-esque thriller, director Wash Westmoreland‘s approach to Earthquake Bird is far more diffuse, the tone and atmosphere more about the intricacies of how these character’s become suffocated in their own existence than the expected fast-paced rush of the genre. Lucy is a dark figure, believing that death follows her, and indeed, it seems it does.
It’s how Vikander and Westmoreland suppress Lucy that will be the most divisive in watching this Netflix production, many maybe not embracing the purposeful containment of what and how Lucy is. She appears passionless, stoic, withdrawn and distant, often blank-faced and cold. It’s this exterior temperament that finds it opposite in Lucy’s personal pursuits of playing the cello with a group of older women and welcoming every opportunity to be part of that culture. She further finds emotional connection in the arms of Teiji and it’s in these moments where we see the balance she rarely lets the public become witness too. But these are shades of a woman flaking into oblivion from a history of sorrow.
On the other end of this is Lucy, a flamboyant big haired 80s girl who has come to Japan with little direction and no ambition to learn about it, her friendship sort of dumped on her by another friend (Jack Huston). The women spend time together where Lily reveals she isn’t without some appeal. It’s here where things become the most complicated for Lucy and the film gives this great space to move about, keeping the constant wonder of what eventually happened always just out of sight and Lucy’s state of mind fervently in question.
Japan is presented both as a land of endless marvel yet appropriately enigmatic, Lucy knowing all the beats to play but perpetually standing out, despite her enormous efforts in disappearing into it. That puts this in some new territory as Earthquake Bird steadfastly refuses to play by the standard murder-mystery rules, abandoning most of the rungs we typically climb in such a movie, instead planting itself in the throes of a deeper psychological twister. It’s quite effective if you’re willing to swim in these waters, with excellent direction and committed performances. Recommended.