Vital (2004)

Having seen most of the Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto's previous films which include the two extremely weird "Tetsuo" movies, I was expecting something a little unusual, not the very small and fairly slow film presented here.  Tadanobu Asano, probably the leading Japanese actor of his generation and something of a chameleon in his roles (think back to "Ichi the Killer" if you've seen it), plays a young medical student who is suffering from partial amnesia after a car crash in which his girlfriend was killed and where he was driving.  She has donated her body to science and as chance would have it he is to spend the next four months leading a team in dissecting her body.  Gradually he begins to recognize her and to remember some of what has happened, although much of what he recalls is only taking place in his mind.   To the disgust of a very neurotic co-student who fancies him and wants him to share her own death-fantasies, he is in love with a dead woman.  The film has a lot to say about the nature of memory and the meaning of death, but by and large it speaks quietly, but movingly.