‘Johatsu’: Tallinn Review

Dirs/scr: Lina Luzyte, Nerijus Milerius. Lithuania. 2024. 83mins

Vilnius-based morgue employee Lina (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite) is aware of instantly that Regina (Rasa Samuolyte) is mendacity when she identifies a corpse as her lacking husband Saulius Vilkas. However Lina can’t totally clarify the fascination the case holds for her. As she tumbles additional down the rabbit gap, it turns into clear that she will not be the one particular person in search of the lacking man, who vanished in Vilnius three years beforehand – though the explanations for his disappearance and his pursuit by numerous shady figures stay frustratingly opaque all through this fashionable however enigmatic movie.

Not the sort of movie that’s within the enterprise of offering neat solutions

The title – which interprets as “the evaporated” – is taken from the Japanese phenomenon of deliberate disappearance, which can also be the topic of a current documentary, Johatsu: Into Skinny Air, by Andreas Hartman and Arata Mori. However, other than the title, a small guide of haiku verses discovered within the belongings of the lacking man is the one tangible hyperlink between this very Baltic story and Japan. The movie, which was co-directed by Lina Lužytė (Collectively Eternally, The Fort) and Nerijus Milerius (the DOK Leipzig winner Exemplary Behaviour), premieres in Tallinn’s Critics’ Picks competitors strand. It’s a particular and atmospheric work, though one that may show too cryptic to enterprise far past the pageant circuit.

The movie begins and ends significantly strongly, with the oppressive, institutional environment of Lina’s office complimented by a completely unsettling musical motif by digital composer Antanas Jasenka. (Music and the usage of sound is first-rate all through the movie.) However a 3rd act that trades the alienating psychological thriller method for the extra typical beats of against the law thriller is much less profitable. It appears like a screenplay that both ran out of concepts or stumbled over the braveness of its convictions; the choice to pad the story with scenes of mafioso menace appears jarringly fundamental subsequent to the skin-tingling sense of unease and existential dread that the image cultivates elsewhere.

Central to the unnerving environment of the movie is Jakstaite’s intriguing central efficiency. Lina is an inscrutable, barely odd character and Jakstaite’s unreadable gaze provides little away. And but she reveals sufficient for us to get a way of a lady who has discovered to operate in society, however for whom society steadily appears like an alien place. Her alternative of office, among the many lifeless, is one clue. One other is the best way she is unable to divert consideration and diffuse the state of affairs when a policeman asks why she is parked outdoors an house block, staring on the unwitting households. “I’m simply … watching.” she says. You possibly can virtually see the cop’s alarm bells sounding.

Lina’s quest to search out the vanished man brings her into contact with a complete circle of fellow misfits. The hearse driver who delivered the physique is frazzled and paranoid (with good cause, it seems), however he does let her sleep in his hearse when she finds herself with out shelter for the evening. And an encounter together with her up to date on the morgue of the Lithuanian port metropolis of Klaipeda, the place the physique was first delivered, reveals extra about his depressing marriage and ingesting habits than it does in regards to the elusive Vilkas.

The questions – in regards to the destiny of Vilkas, about what prompted him to vanish within the first place, about Lina’s gradual disengagement from her personal life – stack up. And this isn’t the sort of movie that’s within the enterprise of offering neat solutions. Finally, nonetheless, it turns into clear that what Lina was looking for was by no means a solution to the thriller, however an exit from the unsatisfactory banality of her personal life.