I watched this on the 31st of May, 2024, at the Phoenix Picturehouse.
It was…unsettling. It’s a psychological horror/thriller which deals with themes of identity, sur/irreality, and obsession. It’s deeply confusing, and genuinely frightening at points. I felt it was most similar to Black Swan in how it combined dreams and reality, hallucination, and intentionally both misleading and breaking the suspension of disbelief of the viewer. The sequence in the second half, of repeated days, the bleeding of real life and the TV series they are shooting into each other, so it’s impossible to tell which scenes in this movie are from the first or second layer of fiction, and of the Idol-Mima’s interactions with “Real”-Mima, leading us to question whether she is a dissociative identity of Mima, a collective hallucination born of obsession with the idol, or a persona put on by Rumi, an ex-star, from feelings of jealousy and nostalgia (or perhaps, probably, a collection of all three), is simultaneously a delusional mish-mash of themes, a razor-sharp evocation of plot and character through the medium of nonlinear iterative storytelling, and one of the most confusing things I’ve ever seen.
The art style was gorgeous, subtly different from modern anime in its colour palettes and technological ability, but this was a story which could have been told no other way - in particular, a scene shot from a distance from the character results in their face being drawn with just lines, evoking emotions and suggestions unreachable with photorealistic media like live-action, in a very similar way to how that frame of Morpheus’ face in the Sandman after he is asked about the death of his son conveys depths of despair and desolation that would not be reached in either a book or a photo.
I particularly liked the parts about the internet, it was an interesting look at perceptions of the internet and burgeoning content as recently as 1997.
Basically, I loved it.
For an external analysis, see here.