One of the stages of grief is anger. In Takahisa Zeze’s “In the Wake,” the trauma of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake turns into a powerful thirst for vengeance, aimed at those who could have done more for the victims.
Nearly a decade on from the disaster, police detective Seiichiro Tomashino (Hiroshi Abe) is tasked with investigating a pair of murders in the northeastern city of Sendai. Both of the victims had worked in the social welfare system, and while their colleagues remember them as upstanding citizens, the police start to suspect that they had made some enemies by cutting off support to 3/11 survivors.
Seiichiro is a survivor himself, having lost his wife and son in the tsunami, and Abe’s haunted expression sets the tone for the film.