Avis Metacritic

Everyone here appears to be revelling in the juicy opportunities Earthquake Bird brings to hit up our memories of everything from Fatal Attraction to Single White Female.

Westmoreland approaches the project every bit as respectful toward Japanese customs as Jones was, although only a percentage of her insights carry over to the film. They’re still there, mind you, but more difficult to detect.

I was less taken with the wait-is-this-really-happening moments that tend to undermine the emotional currency in which the drama is presented to us. Some real tremors, though.

While too muddled and morose to hold together as a psychosexual thriller, Wash Westmoreland’s Earthquake Bird can be compelling for how it both explores and subverts the idea that everyone gets a little bit lost in translation.

This solidly crafted Ridley Scott production is sprinkled with classy ingredients, including Alicia Vikander as headline star. But it is also a fairly flat treatment of over-familiar plot elements, and fatally low on the key psycho-thriller elements of suspense, surprise and dread.

Try as he might, Westmoreland can’t muster the same portraiture skills with a woman of mystery and brokenness that he’s shown with bold, expressive types (“Still Alice,” “Colette”).

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

Netflix's Earthquake Bird is a not particularly engaging thriller featuring an inert performance from Alicia Vikander.

It takes great effort to find what interested director Wash Westmoreland and company in the source material in the first place, but it feels like a project that reaffirms something I’ve long argued: just because something works in one medium doesn’t mean it will in another.

It’s almost a romantic melodrama, but it’s emotionally inert. It’s almost a biting statement about cultural appropriation, but it barely shows its fangs. It’s almost a murder mystery, but it abandons the plot for vast periods of time. It’s almost a good film except, no, that’s really stretching it. At its best it’s an unfocused plod.