He crashes the funerals of people he doesn’t know and his best friend is the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot with whom he plays Battleships. She’s got terminal cancer with three months to live, idolises Charles Darwin and her idea of the perfect first date is a visit to the hospital morgue.  Clearly it’s a match made in heaven.

A return to his indie sensibilities, director Gus Van Sant’s follow up to his Oscar winning Milk is a Sundance wet dream. Death and teenagers have been recurring themes in his work, but he’s never before filtered them through such a romantic prism.

First seen drawing a chalk outline on the floor around his body, Enoch (Dennis Hopper’s son Henry) is a morbidly obsessed loner, orphaned when his parents were killed in a car crash and angry that, because he was in a coma, he was unable to say his goodbyes when they were buried.

He first meets Annabel (Mia Wasikowska, looking a lot like a young Mia Farrow with her close cropped hair) at a memorial service. When she subsequently gets him out of a scrape at another and he learns that she’s dying, he offers to help her prepare for it.

As meet cutes go, it’s a tad downbeat, but there’s no maudlin moping. An eternal optimist, she takes her cue from song birds, who greet each new morning by singing because they’re happy to still be alive. So, Enoch sets out to fill her remaining days with life, be that ice-skating, boating, celebrating Halloween, making love for the first time or playing out mock death scenes.

Inevitably, however, the deeper Enoch falls the harder he finds it to cope with having to lose someone else close to him.

It’s easy to see how some would dismiss this as a disease of the week variation on Harold, and Maude or an art house rework of A Walk To Remember. Van Sant certainly provides them with plenty of ammunition.

The Oregon settings are beautifully autumnal, Annabel may be dying but she never looks less than lovely with barely a hint of the ugliness of cancer, the falling in love montage borders on the twee and when, after the obligatory break-up, the ultra-affable Hiroshi (a soulful Ryo Kase) reveals how he never got to say goodbye either, you fully expect Danny Elfman’s score to  erupt into sweeping strings.

But the film’s much better than that. Soapy melodrama gets short shrift and there’s genuine emotion spilling out when, in a blackly comic and somewhat uncomfortable scene, Enoch takes Annabel to ‘meet’ his parents or when, overwhelmed by his grief and anger, he finally vents his feelings over his their grave.

The film also benefits enormously from Hopper and  Wasikowska’s movingly understated performances that bring depth and grace to their characters, while first time writer Jason Lew’s heartfelt screenplay also subtly but effectively suggests troubled and backstories and painful sacrifices for the supporting characters, Enoch’s long-suffering aunt (Jane Adams) and Annabel’s alcoholic mother (Lusia Strus) and relationship-damaged sister (Schuyler Fisk).

There are some superfluous plot strands (notably a party sequence that leads to the explanation of why Enoch’s not at school), but mostly Van Sant keeps a disciplined but light hand on the helm to deliver a quirky meditation on life, mortality and grieving. And, of course, the real thrust is that while Enoch seeks to smooth Annabel’s passage into death, her purpose in the film is to help him find closure and move on, restoring him to the life he’s suppressed.

Cynics should avoid at all costs, lovers of romantic drama should have a box of tissues within easy reach.

Released by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on DVD and Digital download only, along with deleted scenes and making of featurettes, for the really pretentious art house audience who need to justify indulging, there’s also Van Sant’s silent version of the entire film that substitutes title cards for the dialogue.