`Eureka'.(The Dallas Morning News)

"A tidal wave is coming soon," says schoolgirl Kozue Tamura (Aoi Miyazaki) in the opening moments of "Eureka." "It will sweep us all away." This feeling of overwhelming dread and melancholy carries the film _ and its protagonists _ forward to recovery, if not to redemption.

The tragedy is a random and unexplained bus hijacking in which several passengers are killed. The only survivors are two children, Kozue amd her elder brother Naoki (Masaru Miyazaki), and one adult, the bus driver Makoto (Koji Yakusho). Flash forward two years later: The children are struck mute by the tragedy, and Makoto returns to the town after having spent the intervening time as a drifter, to find that his wife has left him.

The incident has left all three in such severe emotional shock that they are unable to resume any semblance of their former lives. Makoto takes a job as a construction worker and the children live alone on insurance money (their drunkard father died in a car wreck shortly after the mother abandoned the family.) Makoto eventually moves in with Kozue and Naoki and becomes something of a surrogate parent. They are joined by a cousin, Akihiko (Yohichiroh Saitoh), a vacationing college student, and a quiet routine soon develops.

It's a short-lived peace, however. Reminders of the past begin to haunt them, and Makoto becomes a suspect in a series of murders. He's cleared, but the police have their doubts. To rouse them from their malaise, and perhaps shake loose his own demons, Makoto buys and refurbishes a small bus, and the makeshift family embarks on a road trip to nowhere. The killings continue, and each of the three struggles to come to terms with their trauma.

Writer-director Shinji Aoyama has said "Eureka" was inspired after the 1995 sarin gas attacks on a Tokyo ...