Screwed Teruo Ishii 1998

Adapted from a comic by Yoshiharu Tsuge who penned the screenplay, Screwed (aka Screw Style, originally Nejishiki) is a deliberately paced, typically Japanese fever dream starring the always reliable Tadanobu Asano as a downonluck manga artist, Tsube. The stark similarity between the writers and the protagonists names indicates that the film might contain semiautobiographical elements, but then again it could only be a trick. Faced with petty existential problems, the confused Tsube has plenty of ideas, but he struggles to put them together, as he confesses after an imposing prologue of hellish, Zulawskian orgies which crib the color palette from the openings of Shraders Cat People and Stanleys Hardware. He depends on his girlfriend Kuniko (Miki Fujitani), but seems emotionally detached from both her and the rest of the world. However, when he learns that she is pregnant with another man, he tries to commit suicide with the handfull of sleeping pills, ending up in the hospital