Last Life in the Universe brings together three compelling talents of contemporary Asian cinema: Japanese star Tadanobu Asano, Hong Kong–based cinematographer Christopher Doyle, and Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Asano plays Kenji, a fastidious librarian at a Japanese cultural center in Bangkok who believes death is bliss, but whose aesthetically perfect fantasies of suicide are always interrupted by ringing phones and buzzing doorbells. When he does encounter mortality, it belongs to other people. A yakuza killing and the unrelated accidental death of a bar girl jar him out of his orderly existence and into the chaotic universe of Noi, the dead girl's older sister. Kenji takes up temporary residence at Noi's rambling rural house, where the pair makes tentative stabs at communication, and reality begins to drift into dream. Doyle's cinematography here is as rich as any of his work with Wong Kar-wai, and Ratanaruang's idiosyncratic narrative (coscripted by Thai author Prabda Yoon) enlivens a delicate cross-cultural almost-romance with flashes of deadpan humor, magic realism, and Japanese gangster genre gags-including a priceless cameo by Takashi Miike, whose Ichi the Killer appears on a poster in the library.