Perfect Blue

Mima Kirigoe quits her pop idol group to become an actress. Her fans do not accept this. Someone claiming to be her maintains a website describing her daily life in unsettling detail. The roles she takes become increasingly uncomfortable. The line between Mima and the characters she plays begins to dissolve, and then the line between what she remembers and what happened, and then the line between the person being watched and the person watching.

Satoshi Kon's first film. Released in 1997, the same year as Princess Mononoke, by the same country's industry. They have approximately nothing in common. Perfect Blue is the most psychologically accurate depiction of identity dissolution the medium has produced: not a horror film about an external threat but about the specific terror of no longer being able to trust your own perception of yourself.

Darren Aronofsky licensed a bathtub shot from it for Requiem for a Dream. The influence on Black Swan is unacknowledged and obvious. The fansub community had it on hard drives long before Western distribution caught up. It runs eighty-one minutes. Watch it once to see what happens. Watch it twice to see how it was done.