QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

The concept of Johatsu or ‘vanished people’ – which is never explained here, merely name-checked in the title – originated in Japan, where it refers to people who vanish from their everyday lives without a trace. One way to achieve that goal would be to fake your own death, which is exactly what Lina (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite) believes she has stumbled upon someone doing as this opens.

Lina works as an orderly in a morgue. When the fresh corpse of a man supposedly blown up in an explosion on a ship is identified as her husband by his widow, Lina becomes convinced that the woman is lying, and that the body is that of someone else entirely. Which begs the question, what whappened to the real husband? First off, Lina takes it upon herself to visit and question the supposed dead man’s wife. Talking to the woman, she discovers that before the body turned up, the husband had already been “missing” for around three years. Now that his body has been ‘found’, the widow can get on with her life instead of waiting for someone to come back who may never reappear.

While that sense of closure is good for the dead man’s wife, it leaves Lina wanting to investigate further. Her second lead is Alexander, the man who reported the accident, so she goes to find him next. When she eventually tracks him down, it’s late at night, so he offers to put her up in the back of a van in his garage, somewhere he claims to have slept overnight many times himself.

Two other men who are trying to find a missing chip are riding around in a people carrier, and at various points in the narrative they pull either Lina, or Alexander, or both of them off the street into the vehicle to question or threaten them. What is on the chip or what they want with it is never explained. Determined to find it, they go to the extreme of ransacking the apartment of Lina’s partner Tomas (Laurynas Jurgelis) in their attempt to locate it.

There’s a raw and visceral feel to the overall proceedings, even if the finer points of the plot aren’t all that easy to follow at times. At one point, Lina is attacked from behind in the dark, and you wonder if she’s about to be killed. At another, she’s forced to strip down to her underwear in the middle of the road. The whole thing plays out like a journey into a terrible heart of darkness, and by the end Lina is experimenting with saying her name differently, changing it from Lina to Liina. The bravura closing time-lapse shot has her leave her car as day turns into night and back into day.

While individual scenes impress, the wider whole feels less than the sum of its parts. You know where you are by the time you’ve reached the end, but exactly how you got there isn’t entirely clear. An interesting film not without flaws.

Johatsu premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.