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Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital and A Snake of June are playing on Mubi in the United States in the double bill The Human Extremes of Shinya Tsukamoto.Top: A Snake of June. Above: Vital. Shinya Tsukamoto has explored the full spectrum of human darkness over his four decades of filmmaking, including the raw nihilism of 1989’s Tetsuo: Iron Man, the desperate grief of 1998’s Bullet Ballet, and the paralyzing pacifism of 2018’s Killing, just to name a few select examples. And yet the director is usually only associated with the violence and surrealism of the earlier films, particularly edgelord employee pick Tetsuo. What’s often overlooked by fans is that these earlier films stem from the same fascinations foregrounded in his later, more restrained works like Killing (2018) and Fires on the Plain (2014): abject corporeality amid environments molding us as much as we exist in them, and ontological explorations of breaking through those constraints.