‘Sakura’: Secret agents, a murder mystery and one very determined young sleuth

Shadowy security agencies, from the FBI to the KGB, appear in many a movie. The Japanese equivalent, the Public Security Intelligence Agency or Koan Keisatsu, similarly figures in local dramas and films, often in conflict with the regular police who regard them as secretive and uncooperative.

They also supply the title for Hiroto Hara’s mystery-thriller, “Sakura,” with the word being slang for the agency, just as “the Feds” signifies the FBI in English. Based on Yuko Yuzuki’s bestselling novel, the film has a puzzle plot typical of the genre, but its expose of Sakura’s inner workings is reminiscent of Michihito Fujii’s acclaimed 2019 thriller “The Journalist,” which ripped aside the curtain on ruling party machinations to cover up a scandal with rare realism.

Hana Sugisaki’s performance as Izumi Moriguchi, a lowly employee in a prefectural police PR department, is a cut above the usual star turn in a domestic whodunit. As she did in last year’s “Ichiko,” playing an unknowable woman with a hidden past, Sugisaki calls up emotional depths with an unshowy precision and credibility. Her character may be that often-seen type — a cop on a mission — but her lonely torment is distinctively hers, even when her dialogue is generic.

The story begins with a young woman’s death at the hands of a stalker — and a newspaper scoop revealing that cops in Aichi Prefecture sat on her pleas for help while they went on holiday. Izumi and her PR colleagues are soon busy fielding calls from angry citizens.

Izumi suspects that by drunkenly spilling insider dope to Chika Tsumura (Kokoro Morita), a reporter and longtime best bud, she may have been the source of the scoop. But when Izumi confronts her, Chika stoutly denies betraying her friend’s trust — and soon ends up dead herself, her body found floating in a river. Believing that Chika was murdered, Izumi sets out to find the killer.

Along the way, she acquires allies: an earnest young cop (Riku Hagiwara) who she met at the police academy and who happens to have something of crush on her; the brusque but fair-minded detective (Kosuke Toyohara) in charge of the murder investigation; and her avuncular boss (Ken Yasuda), who says he understands her pain due to a traumatic incident in his own past as a member of the Sakura.

The story widens beyond the deaths of the two women to the criminal activities of a crazed cult and the above-mentioned clash among the cops themselves. These developments are grounded in actual events, too much so in the case of the cultists — by-now standard-issue villains in local films.

Izumi’s quest is driven by a deep sense of guilt that Sugisaki embodies with every gesture and look. But there is also a plucky, newby detective element to her character that feels borrowed more from formula mysteries than life, particularly when she is negotiating the dangerous rapids of cutthroat police politics in search of clues.

To its credit, “Sakura” does not finish with the usual lengthy explanation by a triumphant sleuth of how the bad guys slipped up and tied their own noose. Instead, the ending hints at a sequel with the Sakura still formidable and still impenetrable by mere mortals, however heroic. That should still be true 10 sequels from now.