Franka Potente, standing still.

Tom Tykwer, German wunderkind director of 1999's art house sensation Run Lola Run, is a man of many obsessions: judging from the evidence of his movies, he has a thing for accidents, for crime, and for the contingencies of chance and causality. Tykwer likes to mix all three. In his movies, criminals can hardly step into traffic without being run over, like the car thief who gets into a mountain road collision in Tykwer's debut Winter Sleepers, and Lola's boyfriend Manni, the failed gangster who is struck down by an ambulance.

Tykwer's latest doesn't have the signature speed that made Run Lola Run such ecstatic fun, and his star Franka Potente (last seen as Johnny Depp's moribund girlfriend in Blow) isn't wearing her hair cartoonish red. The Princess and the Warrior is subdued and moody, melancholic even. But Tykwer is still driven by the same preoccupations, and it does not come as a surprise that early on, Potente's character gets run over by a massive 18-wheeler in a freak accident that is the result - you guessed it - of an outrageous chain of events involving a blind man, a gun store, and a petty thief by the name of Bodo (Benno Fürmann). In one of the most gruesome scenes I have seen in a very long time, Bodo saves Sissi's life with an emergency tracheotomy. Hollywood lovers meet cute; Tom Tykwer lovers meet under trucks, gasping for air, sucking blood from holes they have cut into each other's wind pipes. At the screening I attended, entire rows of New York's finest film critics were squirming in their seats and shielding their eyes like schoolgirls. Of course, I only noticed this because I couldn't bear to watch the screen myself.

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The reckless speed of Run Lola Run obscured Tykwer's skill at coaxing emotions from his actors and creating full-fledged characters. In The Princess and the Warrior we find out that he isn't only good at breakneck flights over urban landscapes and thumping techno soundtracks, but also in twisting and intertwining fates as if they were giant Oktoberfest pretzles. Still, Tykwer's first interest is always with the abstract, with the brief moments that can irrevocably alter destinies. "Nichts ist egal," Tykwer has somebody say: "Nothing is meaningless," and he means it. Anything can happen, and everything depends on everything else. The movie is set up like a romantic comedy with a darker side, but I distinctly remember the charge I felt when I realized halfway through the film that Tykwer was playing with the form and that a happy ending was by no means guaranteed. Depending on the decisions they make, the story of Sissi and Bodo could turn out very, very bad.

The Princess and the Warrior is by turns lovely, revolting, touching, stunning, and ridiculous. In scene after scene, Tykwer takes immense risks by pushing his ideas one step further than is prudent. The results of his confidence are sometimes jarring and incongruent, but they are always exhilarating, thanks to Tykwer's courage and the strong performances by Potente and Fürmann. The Princess and the Warrior is alive in a way most movies aren't; it's a big baggy monster of a film that you may love or hate but shouldn't miss. The outrageous story of these two survivors is an even more unsettling and rewarding experience than the visceral thrills of Lola's high-speed run.