As we wonder what possible further innovations technology could yield, our thoughts turn to that most complex and mysterious of technologies - the human brain. More famously in Christopher Nolan's Inception and more recently in Spike Jonze's Her, filmmakers have been exploring the notion of electronic, manmade devices accessing and manipulating natural, emotional components within our mind, and also in Kristina Buozyte's Vanishing Waves, which this film bears an extremely close resemblance to. Both are love stories, and in both, a man is connected via groundbreaking machinery to a woman in a coma, and in both, things start to go awry in both the fantasy world depicted here, and the real world. Kurosawa Kiyoshi's concept is promising, if no longer very original, and his technical execution of it sublime: a shadowy lighting scheme and striking production design contribute considerably to the dreamlike atmosphere. But his decision to reconfigure his romance as a crime thriller of sorts, or a mystery, undercuts what emotional strength his narrative possesses, rather than bolstering it. And lead performances from Sato Takeru and Ayase Haruka are just sufficient, but no more. Yet the beauty of the film's design (scoring from Haneoka Kei is lush) and the basic interest generated by the plot, piecing together details gradually and sensitively, make Real a consistently engaging film to watch, and combat Kurosawa's pacing, which is intentionally though not beneficially slow. The film's climax makes complete sense contextually, but that's not to state that it isn't a colossal error on Kurosawa's part, and this is one element of Inui Rokuro's book which he ought to have excised entirely.
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