Real

Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Starring: Takeru Satoh, Haruka Ayase, Miki Nakatani
Time Out rating:
Japanese title: Real: Kanzen Naru Kubinagaryu no Hi

From Robert Wiene to Christopher Nolan, filmmakers have long turned to the subconscious as a source of images more bizarre, outlandish and disturbing than anything reality would allow. In Real, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's adaptation of Rokuro Inui's bestselling mystery novel A Perfect Day for Plesiosaur, we're confronted with a prospect that's seldom considered in those works of fantasy: that our inner world may be every bit as drab as the one around us.

Screen heartthrob Takeru Satoh (Rurouni Kenshin) plays Koichi, a young man whose childhood sweetheart, manga artist Atsumi (Haruka Ayase), has been in a coma since attempting to commit suicide a year earlier. Using a revolutionary technology called 'sensing', he enters her mind in an attempt to revive her, and discover what made her try to kill herself in the first place. But why does she keep asking for a picture of a plesiosaur that she drew as an elementary schooler? And what's with the hallucinations Koichi starts experiencing after he wakes up?

Kurosawa's first feature film since the commercial success of 2008's Tokyo Sonata finds him shifting closer to the mainstream, and the presence of two A-listers at the top of the credits should be enough to indicate that this won't be a repeat of his earlier, darker psychological dramas like Cure and Doppelganger. But anyone hoping for a dreamland fantasia in the vein of Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika, with which Real shares some superficial similarities, will be disappointed. For a comicbook writer, Atsumi's own never-never land is a frightfully ordinary place: she'd apparently rather stay in her apartment scribbling manga than have zero-gravity fistfights in a hotel corridor, and even the appearance of what the doctors call 'philosophical zombies' – alas, more akin to Sims characters than Sartre-spouting flesh eaters – fails to enliven proceedings.

A lack of imagination isn't the most pressing concern here, however. Much of Real is simply dull, not so much Inception as a flatlined Flatliners. Even a bewildering mid-point reversal – absent from the original book, and probably best left that way – fails to keep things interesting for long, and there's seldom any sense of the stakes involved for our protagonists. Satoh and Ayase struggle to bring any real depth or complexity to their roles: at the end of the day, they're just a pair of blandly attractive (and alarmingly chaste) youngsters with even blander inner lives. Couldn't Kurosawa have dreamed up something a little more interesting than that?

Real opens nationwide on June 1