Vital

Beautiful and disturbing, this Asian horror art film explores the intersection between madness and grief with a serene calm that belies the psychological turmoil beneath its silken surface. After a traumatic accident in which he loses his memory, a young man named Hiroshi Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) grows obsessed with a notebook full of sketches of a cadaver dissection, a fixation that extends to the female corpse on the table lying before him in his med school class. Past and present, along with imagined memories and actual ones are intertwined as Takagi becomes convinced the dead girl is an old lover…who died in the same incident that took his memory. Filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto explores the fragile underpinnings of a wounded psyche with both a delicate pathos and an odd scientific detachment, a winning combination of emotion and reason that brings both poignancy and plausibility to the tale. Recommended. (M. Johanson)