This is my place.

This little gem was Perfect Blue, a psychological horror flick directed by Satoshi Kon and written by Sadayuki Murai. This should bring to mind Paprika and Millenium Actress.

Dirty rotten spoilers ahead!

In it, our protagonist, Mima Kirigoe is an almost pop star idol who is coerced/seduced

into becoming a movie star by her agent who thinks she will be more profitable as an actress. Almost every male in the show – except for a few fans and an actor playing a TV rapist – is a scumbag. As a pop idol, she really was sweet and innocent in a kind of girlish way. That will soon be changed.

She gets a tiny one-line part in a TV series about hunting a serial murderer which slowly builds in each episode until she is playing a stripper enduring a traumatic rape scene. By the end of the series, it is revealed that the rape so traumatized her that she broke into multiple personalities and the real person inside her no longer exists. She is the killer.

Later she convinces herself to going full frontal for the studio photographer. She is a

natural model, initially refusing to go nude but then letting it happen. This will permanently change her image from that of an Idol to that of a sexy and desirable actress. There is no turning back. Of course, she is truly beautiful. (I never knew that anime was allowed to show pubic hair without being declared hentai.)

At the same time, her old pop group finally gets their big hit as a duet.

She does these things because she sees them as necessary to her acting career. It is how you get started. But something inside of me says she also likes the attention.

While this is underway, really nasty things start to happen. An exploding envelope injures the director. The writer who created the rape scene just for ratings gets murdered. Horribly. First stabbed in his eyes and then everywhere else. Then the photog who got her panties off for the camera suffers the same fate.

Mimi has started having hallucinations. Her fish are dead and then they are alive. Keeps seeing her face in the mirror, in the window, in other cars. Her face from when she was an idol, a sweet and innocent girl in a stage outfit. It talks back to her, telling her that she’s wrong and has trashed her life. During the rape scene filming, she hallucinates that the extras in the strip bar rape scene are all her fans cheering her on.

There’s a dude with a misshapen face who is stalking her and neither her agent nor the

studio are taking the crimes seriously.

Mimi’s mind is shattering and she’s losing track of reality. She finds bloody clothing in her closet, sees her stalker intermittantly, and her sanity starts to crymble. And it goes downhill from there.

Plenty of blood and gore. Plenty of full frontals of Mimi. Sexual violence thrown at Mimi. There is something Hitchcockian about her struggle to retain sanity but with him, the gore and sexuality would have been more implied than graphic. There are Jody Foster (The Brave One and Silence of the Lambs) references all over the place.

I like that people have real noses instead of suggestions of noses and chins that don’t come to points. To me that improves the art.

It is a movie that requires some brainwork. How and why everything happened the way it did isn’t clear until you think about it and maybe see it twice.

Now, on to my wife’s review!

It was a horrible, evil movie she would never have gone to see if I hadn’t brought her. Next time, unless it is someone safe like Shinkai or Myasaki, I will have to watch the anime myself in advance because she doesn’t want such ugliness in her life. Whoever made this was sick and the only people who would enjoy it are misogynistic males who hate women and enjoy watching them be degraded.

YMMV!