It took the resounding arthouse success of German director Tom Tykwer's exhilaratingly flashy Run Lola Run to trigger the belated release of his previous film, 1997's Winter Sleepers, which is accomplished enough to raise concerns about the failure of foreign film distributors to spot talent, even when it's fully formed. In the past two years alone, veteran directors Takeshi Kitano (Fireworks) and Abbas Kiarostami (Taste Of Cherry) finally received some recognition for their considerable and estimable back catalog. While Tykwer is younger and less promising as an artist, he's also infinitely more accessible, and, if nothing else, Winter Sleepers shows off his technical mastery, crucial considering that the style basically is the substance. As with Run Lola Run, his interest in the peculiar workings of coincidence and fate inform the deftly orchestrated story, which contorts the usual love triangle into a love rectangle, adding numerous twists and complications. The central event—a tragic car accident in a small, snowbound community—echoes The Sweet Hereafter, but the comparisons end there, since Tykwer only keeps the resulting ennui. The four principals are all connected in some way: Ulrich Matthes, a projectionist with short-term memory problems, stole the car that caused the accident, yet remembers nothing; Mari-Lou Sellem is a nurse who cares for the comatose victim from the other vehicle and winds up dating Matthes; and Sellem's roommate (Floraine Daniel), in turn, is seeing the macho ski instructor (Heino Ferch) who owned the stolen car. The characters in Winter Sleepers are not at the mercy of God so much as they're at the mercy of the director, who has their various trajectories mapped out on graph paper. As a result, there's not a whit of spontaneity in how the story plays out, which may explain all the disaffected navel-gazing, but Tykwer's virtuosity is a consistent pleasure throughout. Working on a widescreen canvas, he draws out the whiteness of Bavarian snow like no film since Fargo, and his gliding camera moves are synched to a tastefully somnolent score to create an almost narcotic effect. If ever his style were in service of something, he'd be formidable.