Mima's descent into paranoia doesn't happen to her, it happens to you, frame by frame, until you can't tell what's real anymore. Satoshi Kon doesn't just show you a woman losing her grip on reality; he makes you lose yours alongside her, collapsing the distance between her delusion and your screen. By the end, you're as trapped inside her fractured mind as she is, and rewatching it only deepens the dread because you already know how many layers of deception you missed the first time.

Mima Kirigoe leaves the idol group CHAM! to become an actress, hoping to shed her pop-idol image. Her fans are divided, and one obsessed admirer cannot accept that she is no longer an innocent idol. Pushed by her managers, she takes a recurring part in a crime drama, and the work grows ever more draining for her and her manager, Rumi Hidaka. Then people who work with her start turning up murdered. A stalker follows her both in person and online, while an anonymous website mimics her life in unsettling detail. Weighed down by guilt and haunted by visions of her former self, Mima slides into paranoia and can no longer separate reality from fantasy. The result is a psychological horror thriller about fame and identity turning against the person who carries them.