'Memo'

Some directors put their own neuroses on the screen, with attitudes ranging from the dramatically self-lacerating (Ingmar Bergman) to the comically self-deprecating (Woody Allen). Where actor-turned-director Jiro Sato departs from the messed-up norm in "Memo," his first feature film, is in the rawness and intensity of his on-screen dysfunction.

Playing Junpei, the severely disturbed, obsessive-compulsive brother of the heroine's father, Sato sprays words in stuttered, blurted, barely comprehensible fragments, as his emotions surge and shift in microbursts, like a mad March wind. He washes his hands again and again and again, pausing only to say, with gritted teeth and a sparkly eyed grin, that this time will be the last. But it isn't.

Meanwhile, Sato's teenage heroine, Mayuko (Hanae Kan), writes memos to herself on every occasion, on any surface, with any available medium, including her own blood. She buys writing materials the way Rupert Murdoch used to buy media companies — voraciously, in massive quantities.