Jōhatsu

Following a tragic explosion in a port town outside Vilnius that leaves one sailor dead and another missing, city morgue worker Lina (Zygimante Jakstaite) is unsettled by the comportment of the dead man’s estranged wife when she comes to identify the body; soon, Lina has launched an informal investigation, hoping to make sense of her own suspicions. Documentary filmmakers Lina Lužytė and Nerijus Milerius chart Lina’s progress with a philosopher’s interest in the enigmatic origins of human behavior, drawing inspiration from the Japanese phenomenon of jōhatsu (literally “evaporation”), a term for individuals who choose to vanish without a trace, deliberately and methodically orchestrating their own disappearance, leaving former lives and loved ones behind without warning. The events that follow coalesce into a virtuosically discomfiting parable, reminiscent of George Sluizer’s Spoorloos in its unflinching, destabilizing intensity: a deceptively subdued thriller that locates terror in the impossibility of really knowing our fellow humans, the impenetrable obscurity of their motivations and actions—and, perhaps most frightening of all, the nagging awareness that our own most profound, private truths might be equally unknowable, even to ourselves.