All is not well in Fukushima. One of the first images we see in Yoshihiko Matsui’s “There Was Such a Thing Before” is of a nuclear decontamination worker in full hazmat suit, hanging from a tree after a suicide. A handwritten sign affixed to his body declares that he’s exceeded his radiation dose limit, adding a grim epitaph: “My work is finished. I’m finished, too.”
A current of quiet rage courses through this somber film, shot in washed-out monochromes that match the enervation of the characters. It takes place a decade after the March 2011 triple meltdown at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, in a coastal community that found itself on the border of the exclusion zone.
Matsui’s story centers on two school friends who were young boys at the time of the disaster. Since then, Akira (Oshiro Maeda) has been effectively orphaned: His mother died after the family was forced to evacuate their home, while his father, a former plant worker, went off to join the decontamination effort and never returned. Akira has taken to stalking around the exclusion zone and squatting in the family’s abandoned house, haunted by memories of his parents.
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