Vital (2004)

What makes it different from others?

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

After a car crash that leads to the death of his girlfriend, a young medical student must regain the memories he's lost of her while dissecting her body in anatomy class, watched over by the careful scorn of a new love interest, the original girlfriend's father and dying mother, his own concerned parents, and the class's professor and students. With love scenes involving mutual erotic asphyxiation, dance and theatre added to a stylistic cinematic structure, and flash-backs, dream sequences, and flash forwards all given equivalent value with the same structural equivalent, Shinya Tsukamoto explores a rather direct territory of Eros and Thanatos while wrestling with history, memory, subconscious, and loss. Thematic quote du jour: "How can I compete with the perfect happiness of false memories?" An interesting contextual aside, Tsukamoto's famous Tetsuo: The Iron Man also revolves, plot-wise, around a half-remembered car accident and the ripple-effect of relationships and memories it destroys. I haven't done enough research into Tsukamoto's life myself to know if there was a particularly horrific car accident he was involved in, but the usage is in fitting with his general themes between organism and technology, reflected in Tetsuo as a man slowly turning into a scrapheap and in Vital as a robot from the future experiencing an electrical surge of mankind's memories before being destroyed on the planet Mars, or the contrasting book-ending images in the movie itself of smokestacks at the beginning and rain and nature at the end.As a final note for recommendation's sake, this movie is 85 minutes long and feels like 15.

I normally watch films with no expectations or anticipation of what they have to offer but I wish I'd done some background reading on "Vital" before I settled down to view it. Expecting a horror film, I was left disappointed. Described as a thriller, I didn't find "Vital" particularly thrilling or attention grabbing.While the film is beautifully shot, the movie relies on mood to keep the viewer engaged with what is unrolling on the screen. In the end, though, it's a somewhat confusing meditation on death and left me feeling more than a little frustrated.6 out of 10. This is a stylish entry in Asian cinema but it lacks substance. I've no doubt it will delight some viewers but it will frustrate in equal measure.

Vital contains a single scene of such true, deep, tearjerking, aching love that despite all of its sleepy subtleties, it is truly great cinema. This scene makes you cry and relate to it, and only one who's ever been in deep, heavy, painful love with someone can watch it and understand what I mean. It's such stirring drama in one shot lasting about 5 minutes between two people, and you want that scene to last forever. I haven't felt any kind of emotion like that from a movie in God knows how long.There isn't much else to say about this film. Somehow, Tsukamoto has made a film so powerful based on one scene that is more emotional and moving than any work I've seen in nearly a year from many much much less dry filmmakers.

Wow. This was an unbelievable film. I do so love this genre! Anyway, to me, Vital is a completely different way of telling a love story!Hiroshi has awoken from a coma suffered after a near fatal car accident that has left him without a memory. He tries desperately to piece his life back together. We learn that he was accepted to medical school before the accident, but had decided not to go. After the coma, he ends up going to med school and does exceptionally well...until cadaver class. It is here that he learns that he is dissecting his True Love! He is consumed by her and his ever bettering memory, which gives up glimpses of his happiness with his lover. We see how perfect they were for each other and the audience can feel real lose with her death.I loved the acting in this film. At the end, when Hiroshi escorts his love's coffin to be buried, I truly felt his pain and yes...almost shed a tear. It is a strange and twisted love story, but one that I enjoyed.