REAL
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
The story: Through a procedure called “sensing”, Koichi (Takeru Satoh) is able to enter the subconscious of his lover, Atsumi (Haruka Ayase), and interact with her. She has been comatose since an apparent suicide attempt and he wants to find out what happened and to try to wake her up. Based on the novel A Perfect Day For Plesiosaur (2011).

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s (Tokyo Sonata, 2008) Real is a psychological thriller that reveals its mystery slowly.
For a while, it is content to explore the procedure of sensing.
The audience is eased into it from Koichi’s (Takeru Satoh, right, with Haruka Ayase) point of view as he experiences it for the first time.
Plugged into a machine, his mind enters a space that is their apartment.
But this virtual world is not the same as ours: A pen can float leisurely in space and images of gruesome deaths from Atsumi’s dark manga work flash before Koichi’s eyes.
Plenty of questions are thrown up. Why does she want Koichi to search for an old childhood drawing of a plesiosaur? Who is the soaking wet boy that Koichi keeps seeing or is that some side effect of the sensing?
And is the line between what is real and what is virtual being blurred? At one point, Atsumi says: “It’s all in my mind, right? Anything can happen.”
After a while, you get the feeling that Kurosawa is slowly building up to a twist in the tale. It is not that much of a surprise when it is revealed, but at least it makes some sense.
What happens after that, though, is less persuasive.
Real turns into a kaiju (Japanese monster movie genre) flick as Koichi and Atsumi are pursued by a p***ed-off plesiosaur. And the couple have to uncover some incident that took place on Hikone island, where they grew up.
While Ayase (Cyborg She, 2008) has to grapple with the role of the more opaque Atsumi, Satoh (Rurouni Kenshin, 2012) gets to bring a sense of urgency to the role of Koichi.
But because much of the story takes place in a nebulous subconscious world where characters can be hard to read, one feels emotionally distanced from what is unfolding. Maybe this is another of those stories which work better on the page than on the screen.
(ST)