After waking up from a coma caused by a very bad carwreck Hiroshi Takagi struggles with his newly diagnosed amnesia. The only thing he remembers off hand is his medical books and that he was supposed to go to medical school so he decides to enroll. During a his first class disection he finds that his cadaver holds special memories of his life before the accident.
Vital starts out with a few strange visuals then a group of smoking chimneys which was kinda strange. Then awakens Hiroshi Takagi, our lead character, who's in a hospital room apparently recovering from a car wreck he was in. As he talks with his parents we find that he's got bad amnesia and doesn't even know who they are. They take him back home and he just sits around his room staring into space until he remembers something, he's got a box of medical books in his closet, so he takes them out and looks through them then tells his parents he remembers wanting to go to medical school and that he wants to enroll. Of course they are excited with any signs of him remembering anything so they support it whole heartedly.
So he joins a medical school where he becomes head of his class and gets excellent grades. On his first day of class where they are supposed to dissect a human body alot of memories rush back to him from before the accident, memories of his girlfriend Ry˘ko. That's when we come to find out that by the tattoo on her arm he realises that the corpse he's dissecting in class is actually Ry˘ko who had died in the same accident he had been in.
 
Not able to let her go Hiroshi devotes his entire free time to sketching and dissecting Ry˘ko's body, not letting anyone else touch her. He finds himself constantly having daydreams of his times with Ry˘ko, most of them times where they'd lay around and choke each other, leaving it open to see they were both pretty manic depressive and wanted to die but were too scared to do it themselves, well that and that they had asphixiation fetishes. Anyways for the rest of the movie he tries to remember more and more about Ry˘ko as his mind gets crazier and harder to cope with.
I have to say this movie is definately different than any other Shinya Tsukamoto who directed such awesome movies as Tetsuo: Iron Man, which he wrote, directed and co-starred in, Tetsuo: Body Hammer, Bullet Ballet, and Tokyo Fist, all of which were pretty strange. Regardless this movie had a great feeling to it, the story was completely solid and throughout the entire movie it's like you know how he's feeling in great detail through the dialog and acting. This movie is definately a cut above the rest of morbid love stories and for that I grew a great appreciation for the film. I definately suggest it to anyone, no matter what you like. The story is great, the acting is flawless and it's just an all around great morbid flick.
Vital was definately an enjoyable movie, even considering it's pretty slow through the whole movie. It's the type of movie that will keep your interest even after finding out the most important part of the plot. Definately Recommended.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE:
MOVIE YEAR: 2004
DIRECTOR: Shinya Tsukamoto
WRITING CREDITS: Shinya Tsukamoto
GENRE: Horror, Thriller, Drama
CAST: Tadanobu Asano, Nami Tsukamoto, Kazuyoshi Kushida
COUNTRY: Japan
RUNTIME: 86 min
RATING: 9/10
Vital Website/IMDB Click here
Vital Trailer Click here
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