I Want to Eat Your Pancreas

I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (2018) gets misread because of its title, and the misreading is intentional. The title does not belong to a horror film. There is a belief in Japan that eating the diseased organ heals it. Sakura offers the line as a joke, and by the end of the film the same sentence means something else entirely. Knowing this in advance does not spoil it. It opens it. An unnamed high school student finds a diary in a hospital. It belongs to his classmate Sakura, and it says she has a pancreatic illness and a few months left. Nobody outside her family knows. Her response to him is simple: now that you know, you are going to spend time with me. The best decision the film makes is refusing to draw her as a pitiable patient. Sakura is energetic, insistent and sometimes irritating, not because she is dying but because that is who she is. It is adapted from Yoru Sumino's web published novel, which was a phenomenon in Japan before the film existed. The ending does not arrive the way you expect, and that choice is what holds the film up. It runs 108 minutes. Good for: anime drama, stories about illness and youth, and emotional films. Less good for: death and illness are the central subject, the first half hour is slow, and anyone allergic to the genre's conventions will struggle.