Vital

The latest from the director of ‘Tetsuo’, ‘Tokyo Fist’ and ‘A Snake of June’ is a flesh feast of more high-minded hue, with the inescapable Tadanobu Asano as an amnesiac car-crash victim slowly rediscovering his past life – or perhaps a simulacra of it – when the cadaver of his dead girlfriend comes under his knife at med school anatomy class. If the film doesn’t exactly lay to rest the old conundrum of where human consciousness is located, it certainly has a fanciful time trying; Asano’s character’s flights of memory, or fantasy, or perhaps spiritual transcendence, are something to get lost in.