Last Life in the UniverseMovies like Last Life in the Universe
- Key Features:
- Existentialism, Suicide, Obsessive-compulsive disorder, Redemption, Loss, Cultural clash, Bangkok, American expatriate, Melancholy, Character study
- Tone:
- serious, restrained, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Fans of art house films, Viewers interested in character studies, Those who appreciate contemplative cinema, Viewers interested in Asian cinema
- Emotional Arc:
- Despair → Hope
Last Life in the Universe

An obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian living in Bangkok spends most of his days contemplating suicide in his apartment. His life changes when he witnesses the death of a young girl and becomes acquainted with her elder sister.
Last Life in the Universe
On a cold Monday morning, a group of counselors clock in at an old-fashioned social services office. Their task is to interview the recently deceased, record their personal details, then, over the course of the week, assist them in choosing a single memory to keep for eternity.

A tragedy strikes a young woman's life without warning or reason. She continues living while searching for meaning in a lonely world.

Suffering from acute kidney failure, Boonmee has chosen to spend his final days surrounded by his loved ones in the countryside. Surprisingly, the ghost of his deceased wife appears to care for him, and his long lost son returns home in a non-human form. Contemplating the reasons for his illness, Boonmee treks through the jungle with his family to a mysterious hilltop cave—the birthplace of his first life.

Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.

Three years after his sister's death, Yak relentlessly searches for the dark spirit that killed her in hopes of seeking revenge.

Julian, who runs a Thai boxing club as a front organization for his family's drug smuggling operation, is forced by his mother Crystal to find and kill the individual responsible for his brother's recent death.

A woman, fired from a financial corporation during the Asia crisis, returns home with no money. However, she finds a box with a fortune in front of her door, and decides to keep it. However, the people that left it there soon want it back.

Toru recalls his life in the 1960s, when his friend Kizuki killed himself and he grew close to Naoko, Kizuki's girlfriend, and another woman, the outgoing, lively Midori.

In the immense city of Tokyo, the darkness of the afterlife lures some of its inhabitants who are desperately trying to escape the sadness and isolation of the modern world.

When Pim and Ploy, twins conjoined at the stomach, are separated, the operation leaves Pim the surviving sister, haunted by Ploy's vengeful ghost.

The neglected common-law wife of a Japanese librarian is repeatedly harassed by a young man with a heart condition who seduces her with the prospect of a better life.

Tien is captured and almost beaten to death before he is saved and brought back to the Kana Khone villagers. There he is taught meditation and how to deal with his Karma, but very soon his arch rival returns challenging Tien for a final duel.

Taeko and her husband, Jirō, are living a peaceful existence with her young son, Keita, when a tragic accident brings the boy's long-lost father, Park, back into her life. To cope with the pain and guilt, Taeko throws herself into helping this deaf and homeless man.

The strange comedy film of two close brothers; one, Wilbur, who wants to kill himself, and the other, Harbour, who tries to prevent this. When their father dies leaving them his bookstore they meet a woman who makes their lives a bit better yet with a bit more trouble as well.

A brother and sister learn their biological grandfather was a kamikaze pilot who died during World War II. During their research into his life, they get conflicting accounts from his former comrades about his character and how he joined his squadron.

"The human whose name is written in the Death Note shall die." After making the hardest decision ever, another serious case confronts L. There are only 23 days left and without his best partner Watari, L has to solve the case all by himself for the very first time.

When Jane and Tun run over a girl in a car accident, they speed away immediately from the crime scene. However, Tun, a photographer, soon discovers strange shadows in his photos, which unsettles them.

When a remote village is plagued by a deadly curse, one brother must fight to save his family from a terrifying supernatural threat.

Upon reaching the train station to death, a dejected soul is informed that he is lucky and will have another chance at life. He is placed in the body of a 14-year-old boy named Kobayashi Makoto, who has just committed suicide. Watched over by a neutral spirit named Purapura, the soul must figure out what his greatest sin and mistake in his former life was, before his time limit in Makoto's body runs out. He also has a number of other lesser duties he must complete, such as understanding what led Makoto to commit suicide in the first place and learning how to enjoy his second chance at life.

In a distinctly contemporary Tokyo that looks backwards to the city’s disappearing past, Yoko is a writer investigating the life of a modernist composer of the 1930s. She is pregnant by a man she does not want to marry and has found a kindred spirit in a used bookstore owner who aids her research.

Two projectionists discover a disturbing film featuring the lynching of a woman. Not only are they troubled by the content of the movie, but strange events befall them following the viewing.

Loneliness, death and the meaning of life, explored through vastly separate lives colliding in interweaving short stories set in future Earth.

After falling pregnant to her boyfriend's best friend, a young woman commits suicide. She returns to haunt her unborn child's father while her friend seeks revenge on the person who drove her to her fate.

Toshio hires Yasaka to work in his workshop. But then this old acquaintance, who has just been released from prison, begins to meddle in Toshio's family life.

Bonded in their youth and separated by tragedy, an astronaut and a free diver bend the laws of space and time in their efforts to be together again.

In a Japan of the near future, the government program Plan 75 encourages senior citizens to be voluntarily euthanized to remedy a super-aged society. An elderly woman whose means of survival are vanishing, a pragmatic Plan 75 salesman, and a young Filipino laborer face choices of life and death.

In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.

Ex intelligence agent Ki-heon is tasked with safely transporting Seo Bok, the first ever human clone, who holds the secret of eternal life. Several forces try to take control of Seo Bok to serve their own agendas.

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

A father and his daughter struggle to survive in deep space where they live in isolation.

A South Korean woman in her sixties enrolls in a poetry class as she grapples with her faltering memory and her grandson's appalling wrongdoing.

Pierre, a professional dancer, suffers from a serious heart disease. While he is waiting for a transplant which may (or may not) save his life, he has nothing better to do than look at the people around him, from the balcony of his Paris apartment.

Hong Kong 1997, where young people dream of love and death, suicide and murder. Moon is a cynical young debt collector, smitten by Ping, a young woman dying of kidney disease. A suicide note from a student they don't know ends up intertwining their fates.

Tenshu is imprisoned and sentenced to death for murdering the men who raped his girlfriend. However, he manages to survive his execution and is presented with an option: face another execution attempt or subject himself to their bizarre and dangerous experiments.

Twenty-year-old Matsuri Takabayashi learns that she only has ten years to live due to an incurable disease. She decides to not dwell on her life and not to fall in love—until she meets a man named Kazuto Manabe at a school reunion.

M, a university dropout low on money and luck, volunteers to take care of his terminally ill grandmother, in the hope of pocketing an inheritance.

Each member of a family in Taipei asks hard questions about life's meaning as they live through everyday quandaries. NJ is morose: his brother owes him money, his mother-in-law is in a coma, his wife suffers a spiritual crisis when she finds her life a blank and his business partners make bad decisions.

Shuhei is leading a tough life. His alcoholic mother Akiko can only hook up with bad guys and order Shuhei to go get money from his disapproving grandparents instead of going to school. Except raising the little half-sister, his rock-bottom life seems to have no end.

In Seoul, a suicidal student meets a young woman who decides to join him in his fatal gesture. Dong-soo, an unsuccessful filmmaker, spots a beautiful young woman, who happens to be the lead actress in the film he has just seen. Their stories will cross paths thanks to their love for cinema.

A retired assassin's past catches up with him and his brutality surfaces as he goes on a final killing spree to make things right.

Four insomniac med school students are lured into a neuroscience experiment that spirals out of control and must find a way out before it’s too late.

In post-apocalyptic Yokohama, a hard-boiled cop and a mellowed out drifter hook up with a gang of rebels. When the gang kidnap the cop's son, the wheels are set in motion for an inevitable showdown.

The world has been ravaged by nuclear war. The planet is frozen and radiation kills anyone or anything that ventures outside of 'The Dome'. Soft is a shepherd for the last remnants of humanity who have gathered together as they await rescue from a mysterious craft known only as 'The Ark.' He wanders among the masses, performing his regular daily tasks; keeping morale from plummeting, wooing prostitutes, squashing rebellions, and sometimes feeding the hungry. But as the true and sinister nature of 'The Dome' comes to light, Soft must ask himself if humanity is worth saving...

An orphan girl taught magic by her sick grandma must find work in seedy Bangkok, where she encounters a number of unsavory characters. She uses the magical skills her grandmother taught her to her advantage and to increasingly horrific consequences.

A postman learns that he doesn't have much time left to live due to a terminal illness. A devil then appears in front of him and offers to extend his life if he picks something in the world that will disappear. The man thinks about his relationships with ex-friends, ex-lovers, relatives and colleagues who will be sincerely sad when he dies.

Have you ever wondered "What is the meaning of life? Why do we exist?" The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You'll find it in a small yet amazing booklet, which will explain, in easy to follow, simple terms your reason for being! The booklet, printed on the finest paper, contains illuminating, exquisite colour pictures, and could be yours for a mere $9.99.

While celebrating with her friends in her new cheaply rented apartment on the thirteenth floor of a building, the young Sayaka unexpectedly jumps off the balcony committing suicide. Her mother goes insane and her older sister, Mariko, decides to investigate the mysterious death of her sister.

With only a year left to live, 17-year-old Akito finds new meaning in life by bringing joy to a terminally ill girl who has just six months remaining.

As a grisly virus rampages a city, a lone man stays locked inside his apartment, digitally cut off from seeking help and desperate to find a way out.

The battle rages on as Shirou continues to protect Sakura, now consumed by the darkness. He joins forces with Rin to end the Holy Grail War, while Illyasviel, who knows the truth behind it, confronts her fate. Amidst the chaos, Zouken plots to manipulate Sakura for his own desires. The final fight begins.

A group of boys and girls, twelve in total, gather at an abandoned hospital to die for various different reasons. There, they find the body of a dead boy. The group of twelve attempt to find the person who killed the boy. During their search, the reasons why they want to die are revealed.

A posthumous look at the last days of Guenther's life as he, his best friend, and his sister let loose on a four-day binge of alcohol, drugs, and sex.

Beleaguered police detective Nishi takes desperate measures to try and set things right in a world gone wrong. With his wife suffering from leukemia and his business partner paralyzed from a brutal gangster attack, Nishi borrows from a yakuza loan shark and then robs a bank to clear his debt.

Four horror tales revolve around an accident victim, a bullied youth, ghost stories and a deceased princess.

Six months after losing her only child in the Southeast Asia tsunami, Jeanne is convinced she sees him in a film about orphans living in the jungles.

On the third anniversary of a cult's failed chemical attack on Tokyo and their subsequent mass suicide, family members of those affected gather at the cult's former base on the shores of a lake to observe the anniversary of their loved ones' deaths.

When the head of a statue sacred to a village is stolen, a young martial artist goes to the big city and finds himself taking on the underworld to retrieve it.

An earnest life-coach/author, Thomas Carter, is mysteriously abducted by a deranged client, Angel Sanchez, who delves into Thomas' teachings and uses his spiritual messages of Karma - action and reaction (Vipaka), against him to terrorize him and his family for their past sins.

London, 1953. Mr. Williams, a veteran civil servant, is an important cog within the city's bureaucracy as it struggles to rebuild in the aftermath of World War II. Buried under paperwork at the office and lonely at home, his life has long felt empty and meaningless. Then a devastating medical diagnosis forces him to take stock, and to try and grasp some fulfilment before it passes permanently beyond reach.

This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past -- where he sees his parents before their deaths -- to the present -- where he witnesses his own autopsy -- and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.

Two sisters find their already strained relationship challenged as a mysterious new planet threatens to collide with Earth.

Devastated at the death of her four-year-old daughter, a grieving middle school teacher is horrified to discover that her students aren't as innocent as she thinks.

A bureaucrat interviews five souls to decide which of them will be given a life on Earth. But he soon faces an existential challenge of his own.

A recovering drug addict is granted a day’s leave from rehab and returns to Oslo, where he reconnects with friends, faces the weight of his past, and struggles with uncertainty about his future. Over the course of one day, he drifts through encounters that reflect his longing for connection and his deep sense of alienation.

Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot accept the fact that she was abandoned as a child.

While searching for his fiancee Ritsuko, Sakutarou rediscovers through flashbacks the void deep within him caused by the events from his high school days.

In Burma during the closing days of WWII, a Japanese soldier separated from his unit disguises himself as a Buddhist monk to escape imprisonment as a POW.

Originally a collection of clips from the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series, Death was created as a precursor to the re-worked ending of the series. Rebirth was intended as that re-worked ending, but after production overruns Rebirth became only the first half of the first part of The End of Evangelion, with some minor differences.

Ana is confronted with body and desire at three key moments of her life. As a young girl, she brings her dead grandpa back to life. In her puberty, she discovers the power of decay and sexuality. Finally, she wrestles with loss and loneliness when she returns to her parental home, now derelict.

In a hospital, ten soldiers are being treated for a mysterious sleeping sickness. In a story in which dreams can be experienced by others, and in which goddesses can sit casually with mortals, a nurse learns the reason why the patients will never be cured, and forms a telepathic bond with one of them.

After a frantic suicide attempt, Veronika awakens inside a mysterious mental asylum. Under the supervision of an unorthodox psychiatrist who specializes in controversial treatment, Veronika learns that she has only weeks to live.

A middle-aged Tehranian man, Mr. Badii is intent on killing himself and seeks someone to bury him after his demise. Driving around the city, the seemingly well-to-do Badii meets with numerous people, including a Muslim student, asking them to take on the job, but initially he has little luck. Eventually, Badii finds a man who is up for the task because he needs the money, but his new associate soon tries to talk him out of committing suicide.

While decluttering her home, a woman's hefty house renovation leads her back to the past when she uncovers her ex-boyfriend's belongings.

A love story situated in the Himalayas. A Buddhist monk can't choose between life and the way of the Buddha.

A psychologist connects her missing brother to the strange case of a mysterious little girl believed to be Sadako reincarnated.

Yuma, a 23-year-old comic book artist with profound cerebral palsy, has been emotionally stunted by her well-meaning but overprotective mother. As she begins to seek independence and sexual awakening on her own terms, she discovers an unexpected path to love and forgiveness.

A reclusive illustrator falls in love with a young woman who addictively shops for clothing.

Asako lives in Osaka. She falls in love with Baku, a free-spirit. One day, Baku suddenly disappears. Two years later, Asako now lives in Tokyo and meets Ryohei. He looks just like Baku, but has a completely different personality.

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.

An aging foundry patriarch, gripped by terror of nuclear annihilation, tries to uproot his family to Brazil. When they petition to have him declared incompetent, a family-court counselor witnesses his obsession slide into ruin—and asks whether ignoring the atomic threat is any saner.

Riko is an honest and hardworking man who can count on a group of real friends and a loving wife. Things change after he loses his job and experiences a midlife crisis.

Masato is a young ramen chef in Japan. When he finds his late mother's journal after the sudden death of his emotionally distant father, he takes it with him to her native country, Singapore, hoping to piece together the story of his family and his life.

Three moments in Takaki's life: his relationship with Akari and their forced separation; his friendship with Kanae, who is secretly in love with him; the demands and disappointments of adulthood, an unhappy life in a cold city.

A retired businesswoman – who tries to control everything around her – decides to write her own obituary. A young journalist takes up the task of finding out the truth, and the result is a life-altering friendship.

Johnny and Peter, former paramilitary operatives, search Bangkok - leaving carnage in their wake - to find the men who killed Johnny's daughter, Angel.

After a massive earthquake, only one apartment building is left standing in Seoul, South Korea. Survivors flock to Hwang Gung Apartments, but residents cannot cope with the increasing numbers.

When two siblings stumble on a strange hole in the wall of their grandparents' house, horrifying incidents reveal sinister secrets about their family.

Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

When a remote Thai village is overrun by terrorists armed with a nuclear missile, an elite undercover operative leads the most unique fighting force ever assembled in a heroic bid to save their nation.

A life-size, inflatable sex doll suddenly comes to life one day. Without her owner knowing, she goes for a walk around town and falls in love with Junichi. She starts to date Junichi and gets a job at the same store where he works. Everything seems to be going perfectly for her until something unexpected happens.

A middle-aged office worker encounters aliens and is gifted with alien technology and limitless powers.

Shin has shut his heart ever since his mother died when he was young. His childhood friend Kotori has been looking after him ever since. Now that they are in the third year of high school, and it seems like they can finally move forward, another Shin from another Japan has suddenly appeared in front of them.

An elderly couple journey to Tokyo to visit their grown children, only to find them preoccupied and self-involved.

A group of martial arts students are enjoying a reunion party when a bomb goes off in the building. When they wake up, some of their friends have been kidnapped and they soon find a group of assassins coming after them. The only way to survive is to fight their way out.

An introverted young girl falls in love with a popular senior. However, as she begins to come out of her shell, she faces several new problems.

In a fight for survival against a horrifying army of zombies, a former Muay Thai fighter must use skill, speed and grit to save his girlfriend.

For high schooler Kei—and for at least forty-six others—immortality comes as the nastiest surprise ever. Sadly for Kei, such a feat doesn't make him a superhero. In the eyes of both the general public and governments, he's a rare specimen who needs to be hunted down and handed over to scientists to be experimented on for life—a demi-human who must die a thousand deaths for the benefit of humanity.

The chronicles of four years in the life of Julie, a young woman who navigates the troubled waters of her love life and struggles to find her career path, leading her to take a realistic look at who she really is.

