Last year, nearly 85,000 individuals went missing in Japan. There is even a term in Japanese to describe them: jōhatsusha (evaporated people). Takahito Hara focused on the issue in his 1992 hit film “Midnight Run” as well as its two action comedy sequels. All center on an agency that helps find new lives and identities for those desperate to “evaporate.”
Rikiya Imaizumi’s film “Undercurrent” takes a darker, more introspective approach to this perennial social problem, focusing on Kanae (Yoko Maki), a woman whose husband, Satoru (Eita Nagayama), vanished two years ago for reasons she doesn’t understand. Unlike the agency clients in “Midnight Run,” he was not a debtor eager to escape snarling underworld creditors.
Instead, he was helping Kanae run the family business she had inherited from her parents: a rundown public bathhouse. A former college classmate, he had been her boyfriend for four years and then a loving husband and willing helpmate for another four. In shock from his inexplicable disappearance, she closed the bathhouse. It is open again as the film begins, but Kanae is no closer to solving the mystery that shattered her life.