Wash Westmoreland’s crime-mystery about a love triangle turned obsessive, starring Alicia Vikander, delivers a few real tremors
The Earthquake Bird is the critically admired and prizewinning 2001 mystery novel by the
British author Susanna Jones, which has now been turned into an intriguing, if sometimes redundant, psychological noir for
Netflix by the writer-director Wash Westmoreland.
The setting is Tokyo in the late 1980s, where the threat of intermittent earthquakes is treated as a fact of life. Alicia Vikander plays Lucy, a reserved and professional young woman from
Sweden with fluent Japanese (and English) who works as a translator. She is disconcerted one day when a very handsome Japanese man, Teiji (played by the actor and J-pop star Naoki Kobayashi) who is photographing the reflections that buildings make in puddles of rainwater, turns his camera on her in the street and takes her picture.