Perfect Blue

You don’t watch anime. I know. The studio logos with the launchpad hair. The screaming tournaments. The idea that if it’s drawn, it’s for teenage boys, and if it’s for teenage boys, it can’t scare you. That assumption has kept you out of one of the best psychological thrillers ever made, animated or otherwise, and I’d like to fix that now.

Perfect Blue is about Mima, a pop idol who leaves her girl group to become an actress. Her fans don’t take it well. One of them starts a website that documents her life with a precision she never agreed to, written in her own voice. Then people around her start dying, and Mima’s grip on which version of herself is actually her — the idol, the actress, the one on the website — starts to come apart. That’s the setup. What the film does with it is the point.

Satoshi Kon cuts like a magician. You never get a clean establishing shot telling you where you are; scenes slide into each other on matched motion, so a door opens onto a different room than the one it was in. TV studio floors blur into street. A photograph becomes a memory becomes a hallucination becomes a shot of the photograph again. By the halfway mark you are as disoriented as Mima, and crucially, you don’t know whether what you’re watching is happening. Most thrillers withhold information from the character. This one withholds the grammar of reality from the audience.

And it’s mean in the right ways. The idol industry’s machinery — the handshake events, the fans who believe their devotion entitles them to a person — isn’t set dressing. The horror comes from a woman being consumed as an image while the actual woman gets smaller and smaller. The film came out in 1997 and it has more to say about parasocial culture than most things released last week.

Here’s the bit that should get you over the line. Darren Aronofsky bought the remake rights, and the mirror shot in the bathroom in Requiem for a Dream is a straight lift from this film. Watch Black Swan back to back with it — the doubled self, the performance consuming the performer, the body horror of identity — and you’ll see the lineage. You already liked the American film that owes it a debt. See the original, which does more with less and ends harder.

Eighty-one minutes. Hand-drawn. No tournament arc, no filler. Just one of the sharpest edits in cinema running a knife along the seam between who you are and who people need you to be.

You don’t watch anime. Watch this one anyway.