J Paul Johnson
The strongest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history struck below the North Pacific in March of 2011, some 130 kilometers east of Sendai, the largest city in the Tohoku region, a northern part of the island of Honshu. There, it became a cataclysmic tsunami, wiping out almost all of Rikuzentakata with 40-foot waves, flattening its buildings and claiming a third of its population. Those who survived were left with an enormous task: rebuilding their city and grieving their dead. That last, in particular, is the subject of the pensive drama Last Shadow at First Light, the feature debut of writer-director Nicole Midori Woodford.
The story is told from the perspective of sixteen-year-old Ami (Mihaya Shirata) a Singaporean schoolgirl who has little social life and is haunted by apparitions of her mother, who went missing shortly after the tsunami. At school, she is bullied—though she is quick, we learn, to stand up to her tormentors; at home, she spends her time listening over and over to her mother’s few enigmatic voicemail messages. These brief recordings spark visions and inspire her to journey from Singapore to Japan in search of her mother.
It’s a journey she will make without her father, who is still caring for his aging parents. Upon arriving in Tokyo, Ami meets her uncle, Isamu (Masatoshi Nagase): he too has suffered the consequence of the tsunami, losing his wife and becoming in the process a cynical drunk, spending the few dollars he earns driving taxi on booze and lottery tickets. Against his better judgment, Isamu accompanies Ami to the site of the tsunami’s devastation in search of her mother, becoming her reluctant guide through the both Tohoku’s wreckage and her family’s past.
This narrative structure—setting two contrasting characters in opposition to each other on a shared journey—is one that works well enough often enough, yet in Last Shadow at First Light the conceit feels forced. Neither Ami nor Isamu seems especially well developed as a character beyond their shared grief and most obvious traits (Ami’s spectral visions, Isamu’s drinking and lottery-playing), and Isamu in particular is so unlikable it’s hard to understand why Woodford would wish either Ami or her audience to spend so much time in his company.
To the film’s credit, Woodford has a keen eye for haunting, even memorable visuals, many of them slowly developing a motif of the inexorable, unyielding movement of water. Yet every scene that advances the narrative is framed by several lingering shots that, while visually impressive, do little to move the story along, and as a consequence the pace simply flags. The frequent spectral presence of Ami’s mother causes one to question her—and Ami’s—reality, making one wonder if what little narrative action we witness is occurring in the film’s reality or only as a manifestation of Ami’s palpable grief. At the film’s conclusion, motivated by a fortuitous stroke of fate, it’s hard to say what exactly happened and who is actually alive or dead.
The grief that Woodford’s protagonist is suffering is certainly real. More than 15,000 died and nearly half a million became homeless as a result of the Honshu tsunami. It crippled the country’s infrastructure and caused the meltdown of three nuclear reactors, forcing thousands to evacuate. Its survivors have dealt with its havoc for over a decade and their grieving is consequential. Last Shadow at First Light, some seven years in production and slowed for a time by the coronavirus pandemic, is unrelentingly serious in exploring its protagonist’s and by extension a people’s grief. It is also almost unbearably slow in its pace and uneven in its characterization, despite its impressive visuals.
Ami’s uncle Isamu opines more than once about luck. To him, it was simply bad luck that the tsunami cost him his beloved wife’s life and not his own. It is luck, or the prospect thereof, that prompts his daily lottery playing. One is tempted to dismiss his theory as a drunken rant, surely not something the film will take too seriously. Yet at the end, it’s luck that concludes the narrative—a strange ending to a story that all along has aimed to explore survivors’ trauma with a solemn, studious gravity. In the end, Last Shadow at First Light‘s reach exceeds its grasp, though not for a lack of trying: in so studiously exploring trauma and guilt it never quite manages to present interesting characters, a developing narrative, or a satisfying resolution. Its palpably felt grief is simply far stronger than its story.
Last Shadow at First Light makes its North American premiere on the SVOD service IndiePix Unlimited Sept. 20, 2024.
