Cult filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto abandons, at least temporarily, his monochromatic palette and his preoccupation with bizarre meldings of man and machine for the somber, ruminative drama, Vital, which could be described, reductively, as a love story between an amnesiac and a corpse. We're inside the head of Hiroshi (Tadanobu Asano) for much of the film, and early on, he spends a good deal of time silently observing, staring into the mirror, and trying to get a grip on who he is and what's happened to him. Asano excels here at conveying Hiroshi's sense of alienation. There's a strange girl stalking him who may be a murderer. Then it's down to the corpses. "Trust your own eyes," the professor says. "The truth is there for you to see." This may be an allusion to Stan Brakhage's autopsy film, The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, which fits with Tsukamoto's relatively low-key treatment of the dead here, but it hardly offers a way into this perplexing film. If there's a surreal aspect to the film, it can be found in the oddly matter-of-fact manner in which all the characters seem to accept that Hiroshi is studying the corpse of his dead lover in his med school lab. His loving penetrations of her corpse awaken reveries, in which he imagines that he is with her again. Here, Tsukamoto increasingly uses uncharacteristic splashes of color. Examining her dead body allows him to find a way to reconnect with her and to make sense of his own fractured existence. Vital offers its share of disturbing images and gristly medical-lab sound effects, but in the end, its pursuit of closure is surprisingly hopeful.