‘Johatsu’: Tallinn Review

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

Vilnius-based morgue worker Lina (Zygimante Elena Jakstaite) knows immediately that Regina (Rasa Samuolyte) is lying when she identifies a corpse as her missing husband Saulius Vilkas. But Lina can’t fully explain the fascination the case holds for her. As she tumbles further down the rabbit hole, it becomes clear that she is not the only person looking for the missing man, who vanished in Vilnius three years previously – although the reasons for his disappearance and his pursuit by various shady figures remain frustratingly opaque throughout this stylish but enigmatic film.

Not the kind of film that’s in the business of providing neat answers

The title – which translates as “the evaporated” – is taken from the Japanese phenomenon of deliberate disappearance, which is also the subject of a recent documentary, Johatsu: Into Thin Air, by Andreas Hartman and Arata Mori. But, apart from the title, a small book of haiku verses found in the belongings of the missing man is the only tangible link between this very Baltic story and Japan. The film, which was co-directed by Lina Lužytė (Together Forever, The Castle) and Nerijus Milerius (the DOK Leipzig winner Exemplary Behaviour), premieres in Tallinn’s Critics’ Picks competition strand. It’s a distinctive and atmospheric work, although one that might prove too cryptic to venture far beyond the festival circuit.

The film starts and ends particularly strongly, with the oppressive, institutional atmosphere of Lina’s workplace complimented by a thoroughly unsettling musical motif by electronic composer Antanas Jasenka. (Music and the use of sound is first-rate throughout the film.) But a third act that trades the alienating psychological thriller approach for the more conventional beats of a crime thriller is less successful. It feels like a screenplay that either ran out of ideas or stumbled over the courage of its convictions; the decision to pad the story with scenes of mafioso menace seems jarringly basic next to the skin-tingling sense of unease and existential dread that the picture cultivates elsewhere.

Central to the unnerving atmosphere of the film is Jakstaite’s intriguing central performance. Lina is an inscrutable, slightly odd character and Jakstaite’s unreadable gaze gives little away. And yet she reveals enough for us to get a sense of a woman who has learned to function in society, but for whom society frequently feels like an alien place. Her choice of workplace, among the dead, is one clue. Another is the way she is unable to divert attention and diffuse the situation when a policeman asks why she is parked outside an apartment block, staring at the unwitting families. “I’m just … watching.” she says. You can practically see the cop’s alarm bells sounding.

Lina’s quest to find the vanished man brings her into contact with a whole circle of fellow misfits. The hearse driver who delivered the body is frazzled and paranoid (with good reason, it turns out), but he does let her sleep in his hearse when she finds herself without shelter for the night. And an encounter with her contemporary at the morgue of the Lithuanian port city of Klaipeda, where the body was first delivered, reveals more about his miserable marriage and drinking habits than it does about the elusive Vilkas.

The questions – about the fate of Vilkas, about what prompted him to disappear in the first place, about Lina’s gradual disengagement from her own life – stack up. And this is not the kind of film that’s in the business of providing neat answers. Ultimately, however, it becomes clear that what Lina was searching for was never an answer to the mystery, but an exit from the unsatisfactory banality of her own life.