Earthquake Bird

All three leads are terrific — especially Vikander, whose Japanese is impressive — but they’re working with material that doesn’t measure up to their talents.

But even if this film of a Susanna Jones novel makes a middling whodunit, it’s still a fine vehicle for Vikander, an actress of quiet reserve and inner fury. She and the exotic setting lift Earthquake Bird, even if it never fully takes flight.

Westmoreland approaches the project every bit as respectful toward Japanese customs as Jones was, although only a percentage of her insights carry over to the film. They’re still there, mind you, but more difficult to detect.

Netflix's Earthquake Bird is a not particularly engaging thriller featuring an inert performance from Alicia Vikander.

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

This solidly crafted Ridley Scott production is sprinkled with classy ingredients, including Alicia Vikander as headline star. But it is also a fairly flat treatment of over-familiar plot elements, and fatally low on the key psycho-thriller elements of suspense, surprise and dread.

It’s almost a romantic melodrama, but it’s emotionally inert. It’s almost a biting statement about cultural appropriation, but it barely shows its fangs. It’s almost a murder mystery, but it abandons the plot for vast periods of time. It’s almost a good film except, no, that’s really stretching it. At its best it’s an unfocused plod.

The film is a great study of the Alicia Vikander character (Lucy), a woman who in the past suffered a great tragedy and moved to the other side of the world to escape it. Forget a generic 'thriller,' this picture offers something much more, but this 'much more' cannot but bring further tension and danger into Lucy's life. A great picture in glorious Cinemascope - see it on a big screen if you can.

Alicia Vikander once again pulls a performance from the top shelf. In this racy, engaging psychological love story, we're presented with many themes that cover a broad spectrum of emotions, a story of a love tringle infused with a unique Asian feel to it perfectly showcased by its lead star, Vikander along with a very solid cast sway back and forth in a slow burn format that works most of the time and it can be argued that's it's essential at times, what sticks out is the visual storytelling as the cinematography plays a role itself and it helps set a somber mood which helps with the story. It came to my attention that the film wasn't faithful to its source material as the ending was altered, It doesn't both me as I didn't read the story and I feel like the end was appropriate and fitting and more importantly realistic. This film has depth and conveys a more profound meaning, which gives it a gripping factor that's hard to miss out on. A terrific effort.

Alicia Vikander and Riley Keough are fantastic in this weird but oddly put together thriller

Sadly, the actors are let down somewhat by the pace and structure of the film, which could have been a Mulholland Drive-esque surreal erotic thriller, but instead the lengthy scenes of the rainy streets of Tokyo will leave viewers feeling more damp than wet. A brilliant soundtrack by Atticus Ross helps add to the tension and the cinematography by Chung Hoon Chung is simply gorgeous, all of which means The Earthquake Bird is definitely worth viewing. However, the somewhat muddled narrative and overly long running time mean the film never really lives up to its potential and it never becomes more than a sum of its parts.

Earthquake Bird is an interesting, cryptic and enigmatic film that unfortunately fell short of quality to respond to its own ambitions. The mystery is good. We have Lucy Fly (Alicia Vikander) A British woman living in Japan trying to start a life away from the problems of her past life - which are explained later - But now she's involved in the disappearance of her friend Lily Bridges ( Riley Keough), who is also a foreigner. The crux of the matter is that Lily disappeared and Lucy was the last person to see her and everything gets more complicated when it's assumed that Lily was murdered and maybe Lucy is the murderer. To be honest that sounds pretty good but ... and here is the big flaw: That's not the center point of the plot. It doesn't stop being intriguing because of it but as you progress through the story with all the flashbacks that begin to make sense of the narrative, you begin to understand that you have to unravel the mystery in another way and in all honesty, it wasn't that good. At some point it remind me of Burning for the dramatic/sexual triangle that develops between the three central characters but despite having the same sobriety in tone, Earthquake Bird lacks the necessary psychological charge to get you fully into the tale and the lethargy of the plot doesn't help. No doubt this film is for viewers with enough patience, especially since the film never delivers a great plot twist or a truly stimulating moment with the exception of a key scene near the end that causes more questions than answers. This movie is more a kind of analogy and metaphor rather than an intrigue and that ends up undermining the final result because the story was announced as something else. I admit that it made me interested in getting the book because I feel the story - if it had no changes - will be more comprehensive and complete in a book. Very irregular. You will not be indifferent to it but I think you will not be satisfied either.