tek's rating:

Perfect Blue (unrated)
ANN; GKIDS; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; Satoshi Kon Wiki; Shout! Factory; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Vudu; YouTube

Mima Kirigoe is a pop star in the trio Cham, but she quits to become a serious actress- though she isn't entirely happy with this career change. She just always does whatever she thinks is expected of her, whether she wants to or not. Anyway, she gets a role in a murder mystery called "Double Bind." She also finds that there is a website called "Mima's Room," which seems to have entries written by her, even though she's an internet novice and doesn't know anything about the site. The scary thing is that the entries are surprisingly accurate, as if the site's owner (who seems to be an obsessed fan named Mr. Me-Mania) is either watching her every move, or somehow inside her head.

As if that wasn't spooky enough, her ever-expanding role as a character in the drama seems to mirror what's going on in her life. Many of the people connected to her are being murdered, and meanwhile Mima is having a serious identity crisis, having apparent hallucinations of her former pop idol self, who says she's the real Mima, and that Mima... well, she's really an impostor, a traitor, not the real Mima... Mr. Me-Mania seems to be visited by the same hallucination of this phantom Mima, and wants to eliminate the real Mima, believing her to be an impostor.

As Mima is less and less able to tell what is reality, what is fiction, and what may be hallucination, so are we, the audience. Ultimately there seems to be a sensible explanation for all of this, however. But up till that point- and I'd say to an extent, even after it all ends- everything is in question, and the movie is a pretty intense psychological thriller.


anime films index
psychological horror index