IMDB lists Drowning Man as a horror movie, but it is far from that. A salaryman Tokio finds his wife Kumiko has drowned in the bath. He brings her to the sofa and tries to revive her, but he does not call an ambulance. After drinking himself into a stupor, he wakes to find she has come back to life. Thus, we seem to be heading into a zombie movie, if a very quiet and unusual one.
He finds her skin cold to the touch, so cold he leaps out of bed when she tries to cuddle. She finds he has spread air fresheners through the house to hide a rotting smell that only he can sense. He sets up hidden cameras to record her daily activity, but she seems to just be going about the normal life of a salaryman’s wife, cleaning, shopping, eating lunch, and cooking dinner for him. Her mother and a family friend find nothing abnormal about her, nor does a doctor, but he is convinced she is walking dead. It is only after a re-enactment of the drowning with the friend that he (and we) realize that it is his dream, not her’s as we were lead to believe by her narration that wonders if a person can dream after they are dead. He wanted her to have drowned, and we have been watching the dissolution of a marriage.
There have been clues along the way – his sleeping on the sofa, long nights watching his secret video, an argument when she surprisingly makes his favorite food for dinner – but there is little of the usual pettiness and tension we would expect in a movie about an unhappy marriage. Nor is there the slightest hint of infidelity; he always returns on time for dinner and the male family friend never visits her during the day. Rather than a zombie wife, we have a zombie marriage, walking dead without either person knowing it.
If this had been made in the “old days,” as seen in Naruse’s Meshi or Fufu, the couple would have simply toughed it out. Kumiko’s pregnancy offers them the chance to make a change but it is too late when she discovers it, so they get a divorce (and she apparently gets an abortion).
Written and directed by Naoki Ichio, who worked mostly on stage and made only a handful of movies, it has the look of an ATG production. 
All scenes take place within the apartment, filmed apparently with 16mm and recorded in a real apartment with all the ambient sound of traffic and ventilation a studio would avoid. But the presence of actor/director Shinya Tsukamoto as Tokio and the well-established Reiko Kataoka as Kumiko indicate we are not dealing with any beginner’s work. Neither Tsukamoto nor Kataoka were mainstream stars, but they were stars within the independent world, where Tsukamoto in particular was a major force. Ichio himself shows the eye of an experienced film-maker, and despite its small cast it is far too visually oriented to offer the slightest hint that it might have begun as a play.
As I often find myself writing, it is an unusual movie, but unusual only in its use of the zombie or ghost wife as a metaphor for the lack of communication or understanding that even an apparently happy couple can have.
Japanonfilm 