Not being the biggest fan of Shinya Tsukamoto's acclaimed cult favorites "Tetsuo" & "Tetsuo II", I was rather careful with my anticipations towards "Vital"; of which the DVD-box announces it as the director's latest masterpiece. Well it ain't no masterpiece, but it's definitely a compelling and suspense-packed thriller that I liked a whole lot better than the boisterous Tetsuo-films. Especially the basic story ideas are very ingenious and even original! The plot centers on the young Hiroshi Takagi who slowly recovers from a dramatic car accident in which his lost his whole memory and youthful spirit. The sight of a book about surgery suddenly makes him decide to study medicines, where he becomes somewhat of a strange outcast but with a natural talent to dissect corpses. Bit by bit his memory returns and Hiroshi comes to the painful establishment that he's performing an autopsy on his former girlfriend Ryôko, who died in the same accident and put her body at the disposal of the medical faculty. My main problem with "Vital" was that it quickly got tedious once Hiroshi realizes whose corpse he hacks up and - especially near the end - Tsukamoto inserts a lot of irrelevant dream sequences and images of scenic beauty. It actually would be a lot more effective and horrific as a short movie, I think. It's a fairly short film now (86 min.) but it would have been so much better as a part of trilogy like, say, "Three
Extremes" and exclusively focusing on Hiroshi's amnesia. Tsukamoto is clearly a gifted director who also knows a thing or two about cinematography. "Vital" is often beautiful to look at and loaded with symbolism. Worth watching.