I got confused half way through... (spoilers)
I somehow confused myself over which of them was diagnosed at the beginning. When the wife died unexpectedly, i managed to convince myself that the diagnoses scene was ambiguous and it was never explicit in which of them was ill.
My first reaction when the wife dies was: "oh great predictable plot twist". Then i thought about it a bit and was excited because i thought maybe i missed something in the first scene.
Up till that point the whole movie works with either of them being the one with the illness. Either the wife is not telling the husband he will die, or she is the one with the illness and is hiding it from him.
After going back and viewing the first scene again i was wrong, and it clearly says that the husband was ill. But to me it would have been great if that scene could really have been made ambiguous. I like it when a movie is clever enough to fool you convincingly for a whole hour.
I wonder if that first scene could be scripted to make it convincing that either one could be dying, or hint at one but not be clear. Anyone else think it would work well like that?
So unfortunately it didn't fool me and was just an oh-the-one-you-didn't-expect-to-die-died plot twist. But even so it was still a very good film plenty of unusual scenes and realism more convincing than most.
Just a couple of the shots were very amateurish and dropped me out of the experience (mainly in second half in Japan for some reason), but that's a minor complaint and the rest of the movie more than makes up for them.