Earthquake Bird (2019) - Movie Review

The latest feature from former gay porn director and current frontrunner for best queer filmmaker working today Wash Westmoreland certainly fits into his main oeuvre. It’s a psychosexual thriller about a Swedish expatriate in 1980’s Japan, played with simmering anguish by Alicia Vikander, one that is basically bisexual aesthetic on blast. As I got into earlier this month, we stan the Bisexual Bard in this house, and between his previous efforts Still Alice and Colette, I’ll admit to looking forward to this. Not sure if that was the best move, though.

As far as psycho-thrills, this has quite a bit of Perfect Blue energy to it. Not because this has anything to say about the cultural entertainment industry, but in terms of its approach to mind-bending, it taps into a similar hallucinatory path. As Vikander’s Lucy and her love triangle with local photographer Teiji (Naoki Kobayashi) and fellow Westerner Lily (Riley Keough), it comes across like Lucy’s struggles with her own sexual identity are literally affecting her health. Both mentally, with how much her sexual frustrations play into her dissociative moments, and physically, given the appearance of a rash later on in the story.

It’s a decent take, and it certainly feels true to my own experiences as far as what it feels like to try and come to terms with having a sexual identity that isn’t the norm (like, even in LGBT circles, the bisexuals get a bad rap). Shame that the film’s own setting and even genre feel like afterthoughts compared to that. The Lost In Translation-esque narrative about cultural differences and alienation seems like a good idea at first, until it sets in how indebted its perspective is to its own tourism. I mean, the main character trait for Teiji, the romantic lead, is that he takes photos of people. A Japanese man who might as well be surgically attached to his camera… yeah.

The rest of it doesn’t manage to get much further than commenting on male gaze and social voyeurism, topics that Wash West has shown more than enough aptitude with in the past, but it results in diminishing returns here.

As for it being a thriller, the moments of true psychedelia only kick in after the first half. Up to that point, it’s all so muted and low-key that it doesn’t manage to generate much more than a light murmur in response. Especially for a thriller with a murder mystery at its core, which is both bland and quite predictable, despite the film’s best efforts. That’s already weird enough, not being able to keep tensions high in a story genre built on tension, but as a romantic thriller, it falls even harder. The chemistry between all three members of the love triangle just don’t connect as they should, to the point where I desperately wish that Riley Keough was in more of the movie than she ultimately was because at least she brought life to her dialogue.

I won’t go so far as to say this is completely bad, as it has plenty of visual style and the actors definitely rejuvenate the rather limp scripting. But even then, between the talent on-screen and behind the camera and my own want to see more practical bi representation in cinema, this is merely okay at best when it should have been done far better.