Parky at the Pictures (DVD 23/11/2017)

Following a dockside assassination at the end of a conversation about fish, Han Jae-ho (Sol Kyung-gu) greets protégé Jo Hyun-soo (Yim Si-wan) outside Gyeonngi Prison in a flashy red sportscar. He makes him a welcome home gift of a blonde Russian prostitute and we flash back three years to see how the cocky Hyun-su made an impression on Jae-ho by causing a ruckus after winning a face-slapping competition with Jung-sik (Kim Ji-hoon) by using an artfully concealed punch. They return to the headquarters of crime boss Chairman Ko (Lee Kyoung-young) as no-nonsense police chief Cheon In-sook (Jeon Hye-jin) stubs her cigarette out in a helping of Beluga caviar and warns Ko Byung-chul that she will be ready to pounce whenever he makes a mistake.

But Ko is a shrewd operator and, when nephew Byung-gab (Kim Hee-won) tries to pick on Hyun-soo a fortnight after he joins the ranks, he humiliates him in front of the entire gang for being as recklessly foolish as his father. Having grown up with Byung-gab in an orphanage, Jae-ho enjoys the confrontation and mocks him when he finds him snivelling in his car.

As jailed pastor Jang (Park Soo-Young) had explained to Hyun-soo in jail, Jae-ho is not a man to be messed with, as he had taken over the lucrative cigarette trade at Gyeonngi within hours of his arrival. Indeed, he became such a smooth operator that he was allowed banquets with his oppos that resembled Leonardo Da Vinci's painting of the Last Supper. But kingpin Kim Sung-han (Heo Jun-ho) had proved a tougher nut to crack. When Jae-ho approached him with an offer to go 50-50 on the cigarette situation, Kim had used his friendship with the prison security chief (Jin Seon-kyu) to have him beaten with clubs and tossed into solitary. Moreover, when Jae-ho is released, Kim has Jung-sik stalk him with a shiv, only for Hyun-soo to come to his rescue in the corridor and earn a carton of cigarettes for revealing that his mother (Nam Gi-ae) had always told him to stick up for the little guy.

But Hyun-soo also has a plan to use Jae-ho's phone to doctor some photographs framing the security chief for profiting from the cigarette business. He bristles at their impudence and smashes the phone. But the threat of Jae-ho releasing the images to the prosecutor persuades him to let Jae-ho wreak his revenge by pouring boiling pork stock over the heavily tattooed Kim's legs and face, even though he has revealed that Ko had paid him to eliminate Jae-ho because he had messed up with a drug shipment.

Nearly five weeks have passed since Hyun-soo was released, Ko still refuses to believe that Kim died of a heart attack. But Byung-gab swears that he checked up on the details and Ko tuts that his nephew is too close to Jae-ho to see his faults and suggests that he is losing patience with the stray dog who has never learned how to show gratitude. At that moment, Jae-ho smashes a baseball through Ko's window and he pretends to laugh off the incident. But he is convinced that Jae-ho and Hyun-soo are up to no good and tells Byung-gab that he intends putting Jae-ho down after the next big deal with his Russian contacts.

We now flashback three years and four months to see Chief Cheon showing her Busan superior (Kim Ik-tae) a video advertising the fish business that Ko uses as a front for his illegal activities. She explains that he used to provide strippers for a club owned by Vladivostock mobster Vitali Gegard (Igor N. Maslov), but is now his partner in smuggling meth, cocaine and hashish. Yet, while her boss wants her to pursue media-friendly cases like a pop star bust, Cheon is determined to nail Ko and she promises rising rookie Hyun-soo that she will find his sick mother a new kidney if he agrees to go undercover as a swaggering wannabe and latch himself on to Jae-ho while behind bars. Desperate to help his mother, Hyun-soo agrees and he goes about ingratiating himself.

After two years, Cheon informs Hyun-soo that she has found a donor and he is overjoyed. But, when she discovers that another undercover cop has been shot (after the fish conversation), she has the mother shot in the street and refuses to allow Hyun-soo to attend the funeral. Already feeling fragile because Byung-gab has informed him that he is plotting to kill Ko, Jae-ho tries to console his young friend in his cell late at night. But he responds with fists and they have a titanic struggle before Hyun-soo gives in. Yet Jae-ho pays for the funeral and arranges for Hyun-soo to get a day's furlough from the security chief. On his return, he is glad to see Jae-ho, who tells him how he survived his mother's efforts to poison the father who beat them both whenever he drank and how this taught him to trust circumstances rather than people. He also suggests that they hook up on the outside, but Hyun-soo confesses that he is a cop.

Returning to the present, 127 days have now passed since Hyun-soo was released and Cheon listens in on a recording made on Hyun-soo's watch when he went to reclaim some stolen customs seals from Choi Dae-hyun (Choi Byung-mo). He thinks he has the novice beaten, but Hyun-soo pins his hand to the desk with a knife and starts beating up his henchmen, while Jae-ho and Byung-gab linger on the quayside with back-up for a humdinger of a showdown that culminates in Hyun-soo repeatedly hitting Choi in the face with the watch protecting his knuckles. On returning the seals, Hyun-soo tells Ko that it was a fun assignment and he is impressed by his gung-ho attitude. But Jae-ho's laughter is uneasier, as he knows Hyun-soo and Byung-gab's secrets.

His suspicions are aroused, therefore, when Hyun-soo slips away from a meeting at Gegard's club to collect a new watch from Cheon's underling, Min-Chul (Jang In-sub). When confronted, Hyun-soo accuses him of being a pervert who tried to watch him pee and Jae-ho beats the cop up. But he has to be convinced that Hyun-soo is not setting him up and he takes him to his first hideout and reminds him of the difficulty he has in trusting people. However, he is surprised when Hyun-soo confides that he trusts Jae-ho, even though they are on opposite sides of the law.

The extent to which this trust is justified is tested by a flashback to the prison visit when Byung-gab had shown Jae-ho footage of Hyun-soo and Cheon together in an eaterie. Jae-ho had been stung by the revelation, but he had also remained convinced that Hyun-soo was a good kid and he had vowed to bait him into joining the gang. However, Cheon also has her doubts about Hyun-soo's loyalty and she has him kidnapped and doused in petrol to see whether he had gone over to the dark side. But he holds his nerve and passes on details of a 50kg haul of blue meth that Ko is lining up with the Russians. However, Cheon withholds information about the hit-and-run accident that supposedly accounted for his mother/ Returning to Jae-ho's office looking the worse for wear, Hyun-soo tries to act nonchalantly. They go to the beach and let off fireworks and Hyun-soo admits that he is struggling to come to terms with his loss. But Jae-ho reminds him that if she hadn't died, he wouldn't have paid for the funeral and they wouldn't have become friends. Hyun-soo shrugs in the passenger seat of the red sports car as dawn breaks and, shortly, afterwards, intercepts Cheon when she is out jogging to her information on Ko's deal and when and where she can pounce.

Hyun-soo has now been at large for 150 days and he is sent out in a boat when Ko drives to a rendezvous with Gegard for their D-Day deal. As the cash is being counted, however, Cheon arrives with reinforcements to arrest everyone and hold them at gunpoint while she opens the packing cases to top off her triumph. But they contain sex toys and Ko and Gegard can barely conceal their disdain as they repair to the latter's office to complete the transaction. Seemingly, Jae-ho had hit upon the idea to exploit Hyun-soo's status to lure Cheon to the warehouse so that they would be able to smuggle the meth into the port using floating sacks. He calls Hyun-soo to check the merchandise and, the moment they know they have scored a huge deal, Jae-ho and Byung-gab turn on Ko and slaughter him and his bodyguards.

But Cheon refuses to take defeat lying down and, even though Min-chul seems to accept that Hyun-soo was twice shot in the arm during the operation (in fact, Hyun-soo agreed to let Jae-ho shoot him to reinforce his story), she insists on bringing him in and showing him CCTV footage of Jae-ho rushing to his mothers dying body in the middle of a quiet road. Hyun-soo leaps at her and tries to throttle her and asks why she is treating him so badly and she sneers back that she is merely doing her job and now needs him to do his and arrest his mother's killer.

As he sits alone in an interrogation room, Hyun-soo recalls Jae-ho's maxim about trusting circumstances rather than people. But he still interrupts a gang celebration to warn him that he is under surveillance and asks if anyone else knew he was a cop. Jae-ho casts a meaningful glance at Byung-gab, who is enjoying his new power as head of the family and oblivious to the fact Jae-ho is on the phone. But his reign is short-lived, as Jae-ho bludgeons him to death in his office after everyone has gone home and he heads for his old base to meet Hyun-soo. He has been fitted with a wire and Cheon and her team listen in from a van parked around the corner. Jae-ho sees the vehicle as he arrives and makes a joke about it as Hyun-soo urges him to pat him down to check he isn't bugging him.

As they chat, the cops close in. But Hyun-soo finds it hard to betray Jae-ho, even though he knows he killed his mother and all Jae-ho can say on the matter is that he wished Hyun-soo had not discovered the truth. Shots ring out, as the unit moves into place and Min-chul creeps into the main room to see Hyun-soo sitting on the sofa. He motions behind him and another exchange of fire follows, ending with Min-chul being executed by Jae-ho as he points a gun at Hyun-soo's forehead. Refusing to accept this deed of friendship, Hyun-soo tells Jae-ho to finish him off. But he lowers the gun and fires past his shoulder and limps out into the night.

Approaching his car, Jae-ho is mown down by Cheon in the detector van. She walks over to his crumpled body and demands to know where he has stashed the drugs. When he refuses to answer, she takes the keys to his car and is opening the boot when Hyun-soo appears from the shadows to gun her down and empty the clip into her for ruining his life. He sees Jae-ho on the ground and crouches over him. Whether out of compassion or vengeance, he suffocates him and slumps down, as he ponders what move to make next.

Byung Sung-hyun and co-scenarist Kim Min-soo pack so many twists and double-crosses into this exhausting thriller that alert viewers will start to anticipate them by refusing to take anything they see at face value. Fortunately, the splendid cast commits to the endless contrivances with deadpan aplomb, although the steely Sol Kyung-gu summons some genuine affection for both old pal Kim Hee-won and new broom Yim Si-wan. The latter manages to reciprocate (in not quite the same homoerotic manner), even after discovering the truth about the road accident, although Byung and Kim might have missed a trick by having Jae-ho discover a victim of Cheon's murderous driving. Perhaps they didn't, as it's not always possible to read between the lines on a first viewing.

Although he has often played edgy characters in his 21-year career, Sol revels in his hard-nosed villainy, while Yim continues to suggest he has made the right decision in moving on from K-Pop boy band ZE:A. Kim Hee-won is splendidly brattish as the nephew with a long-simmering grudge, but the most nuanced performance comes from Jeon Hye-jin, whose calculating cop remains largely inscrutable until the denouement.

Editors Kim Sang-bum and Kim Jae-bum merit mention for piecing the fragments together across the various timelines, while Hur Myung-hang should take a bow for the belligerent fight choreography. Composers Kim Hong-jip and Lee Jin-hee also make a boomingly versatile contribution to the action sequences, although they drift towards mawkishness in some of the quieter passages. Similarly, Cho Hyung-Rae's photography is slick without generating a particularly strong sense of place, although it's interesting to note that the scenes set in the prison exercise yard are the sunniest and most spacious in the entire picture.

South Korean stuntman-turned-director Jung Byung-gil is clearly aware of the high-kicking, fist-flying, sword-wielding women who have become such a feature of Asian action movies. But he and co-writer Jung Byung-sik also lean heavily on Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990) in making The Villainess, his second fictional feature after the serial killer thriller, Confession of Murder (2012). But the influence of Yasuharu Hasebe, Park Chan-wook and, yes, even Tarantino is evident in an often gleefully over-the-top romp that combines cartoonish and sickening violence with a punishing attitude towards women that is supposed to be back-handedly complimentary.

Following a bravura opening sequence that uses a wall mirror to switch from a first- to a third-person perspective as a black-clad assassin slays all-comers in corridors, stairwells and a gymnasium, Sook-hee (Kim Ok-bin) is cornered by the cops in a back alley downpour. She is placed in a sparsely furnished room with a large wooden crucifix on the wall and sedated with fumes pumped in through a ventilator. On the orders the Korean Intelligence Agency, Sook-hee undergoes plastic surgery and is afforded the opportunity to escape from handlers in breathing apparatus so that Kwon-sook can assess her prowess, as she takes a hostage and blunders through a ballet class, a kitchen and a drama rehearsal before being shot while attempting to jump to freedom off a rooftop.

The KIA broadcast that a Chinese-Korean agent has committed suicide in detention and Sook-hee agrees to work for the bureau for a decade after she is informed by handler Kwon-sook (Kim Seo-hyung) that she is pregnant. However, she does poorly at the aptitude tests designed to determine her sleeper profession and only responds to acting before giving birth to a daughter, Eun-hye (Kim Yun-woo). But, while she proves a doting mother, Sook-hee remains a honed fighter and teaches cocky Kim-sun (Jo Eun-ji) a lesson when she tries to humiliate her in a kendo session. She also beats her in a speed trial to assemble and fire a pistol, an exercise that reminds Sook-hee of put coerced into taking a similar test as a young girl (Min Ye-ji) by Joong-san (Shin Ha-kyun), the gangster who had turned her into a killing machine following the murder of her father (Park Chul-min).

Sook-hee had been hiding under the bed when her father had been butchered and his blood had splattered her face. But she also sees a young girl looking down at her after she has a spot of bother dispatching her first target as a KIA killer and has to sword fight with him before eventually running him through on the upstairs landing. Momentarily stunned by the gaze of her witness, Sook-hee had fled on a motorbike, only to find a fleet of besuited henchmen pursuing her. Several fail to survive bushido duels while speeding through a narrow road tunnel and Sook-hee is forced to ride over a police car and plunge into the river when confronted with a roadblock.

Holding her breath underwater, Sook-hee sees her father's reassuring face and recalls the fishing trip with a family friend when she had been shown the white opal she would be given on her wedding day. However, this prompted the unseen friend to murder Sook-hee's father and he had found her cowering under the bed when he had returned to find the precious stone. Thus, Sook-hee sobs when she surfaces and scrambles to the bank, where she finds Kwon-sook waiting for her. She takes Sook-hee to her new apartment in an undisclosed part of South Korea, where she literally bumps into Hyun-soo (Sung Joon) in the lift.

Sook-hee has no idea that he is her KIA minder and has been following her progress on CCTV from the moment she arrived at the base. Indeed, he gave baby Eun-hye the cuddly rabbit she still takes everywhere and he tries so hard to make a good impression on Sook-hee that she calls Kwon-sook to run a background check on his story about being widowed in a robbery. She finds him irksome when he intercepts a pizza delivery and suggests she should give her daughter healthy food. But she is also touched by the fact that his wife came from Yanbian, the autonomous prefecture in north-eastern China where she was raised.

A succession of chance encounters softens Sook-hee's attitude to Hyun-soo, especially as Eun-hye seems to like him. But, when he greets her off the bus with an umbrella, she invites him to watch her perform in a play and they go to dinner afterwards. As he knows her so well from his KIA observations, he wears a tie the same cobalt colour as the one Joong-san had worn on the day he married Sook-hee and took her to Seoul for their honeymoon. However, despite his promise that they would live a normal life, he had been murdered by the same man who had killed her father.

Driving home after supper, Hyun-soo lets slip that he wishes Sook-hee wasn't married and offers to walk home in the rain rather than embarrass her in front of the babysitter. But Sook-hee stops the car and comes back for Hyun-soo with an umbrella and they kiss on returning home after she admits her husband is dead. They are undoing shirt buttons when Sook-hee gets a phone call and she lies about a colleague being rushed to hospital in order to meet up with Min-joo (Son Min-ji), her only friend on the training course who has just been given her first mission. They are to pose as escorts to steal the secrets hidden on their client's phone. However, Sook-hee's theft of the man's phone is easily detected and Min-joo is stabbed through the neck during the ensuing struggle. Having killed her foes, Sook-hee rushes Min-joo to the waiting van. But Kim-sun refuses to get medical attention for Min-joo and blames her death on Sook-hee's bungling and she returns home to sob in the shower with Hyun-soo trying to console her.

During a debriefing on Min-joo's death, chief Joong-san reveals that Sook-hee has ties with Joong-san's treacherous lieutenant, Choon-mo (Lee Seung-koo), and may even be a double agent. However, they are keen to catch Choon-mo's boss and Kwon-sook suggests that Sook-hee might be the perfect woman for the job. But, first, she has to approve Sook-hee's request to marry Hyun-soo, who has hinted that he isn't the man she thinks he is, only to be informed that she is a very different woman to the one he knows. Sook-hee pretends to seek permission from her parents and Kwon-sook is sitting next to Hyun-soo when she phones with good news about their wedding.

On the day of the ceremony, however, Kim-sun arrives out of the blue and taunts Sook-hee for getting Min-joo killed. She also hands her a phone, as Kwon-sook orders Sook-hee to go to the toilets and assemble a high-powered rifle from packages hidden around the room. Yet, when she aims through the fan blades of a building opposite, Sook-hee is taken aback by the target in the sunglasses and misses her aim with several shots. She is called back inside and marries Hyun-soo, with Eun-hye as the flower girl. He urges her to be happy, but she knows she recognised Joong-san and can't remember why. But (despite the plastic surgery) he finds her face familiar, too, when Choon-mo shows him a photograph of his would-be assassin.

Sook-hee spots Joong-san in the audience during the next performance of her play and he looks on as the heroine shoots herself in the head in the last act. He slips into the seat opposite her when Hyun-soo is called away during dinner and asks if she recognises him. She stays in character, as he pulls out a gun beneath the table, and warns him that she would be prepared to eliminate a past love in order to protect what she now has. Remaining icily cool, Joong-san apologises for mistaking her for someone he once loved and a tear wells in Sook-hee's eye, as he rises and leaves.

As she starts out of her reverie, we flashback to Sook-hee's wedding night with Joong-san. He had been forced to self-stitch a wound on his cheek and this had reminded him of the dead face of his new bride's father. She twirls in her wedding dress and promises to forget about seeking vengeance if Joong-san promises to live a normal life, as she knows he was not responsible for killing her father.

Back in the present, Kwon-sook shows Sook-hee a photograph of her speaking to Joong-san in the restaurant and asks why she failed to finish him on her wedding day. She claims he is merely a fan and is piqued when Kwon-sook reminds her that she jeopardises her future by not following orders. Joong-san sends Sook-hee flowers and she feels a pang when Kim-sun taunts her with the fact that she has been ordered to wipe her ex-husband out. Despising Kim-sun, Sook-hee messages Joong-san and he ambushes the assassin when she arrives in his building and beats her up.

Furious that her plan has been thwarted again, Kwon-sook sends Hyun-soo to Yanbian to execute Joong-san and warns him that Sook-hee's safety depends on his success. Fully aware of the relationship between his wife and his target, Hyun-soo declares that he needs to nurse his ailing mother and hugs Sook-hee, who may just be starting to suspect that her husband is not who he says he is. However, she gets no time to ponder her predicament, as she is taken at gunpoint by Kwon-sook, who reveals that Hyun-soo is a KIA agent. As he goes to collect Eun-hye, Joong-san rams the car carrying Sook-hee and shoots Kwon-sook and her henchmen. He gives Sook-hee a gun and tells her to rescue her daughter, but she arrives home in time to see them thrown from the apartment by a bomb blast that kills them both and Sook-hee is distraught.

She returns to KIA headquarters and finds Kwon-sook, who has been wounded in the right arm. Sook-hee pulls a gun on her, but Kwon-sook plays her surveillance footage from inside the flat and shows Choon-mo (carrying the sledgehammer that Sook-hee had seen from under the bed on the night her father died) attack Hyun-soo with the help of Jang-chun (Jung Hae-kyun) and Kim-sun (who has clearly betrayed Sook-hee in the hope of surviving) . Recognising him as Joong-san's sidekick, he tries to shout down the phone that Eun-hye is his child. But Choon-mo drops a blade into the floor to distract him and they fight before Hyun-soo is eventually overpowered. Choon-mo executes Kim-sun and detonates the bomb so that Sook-hee sees her husband and daughter die.

Distraught, Sook-hee asks Kwon-sook why she is tormenting her and falls to her knees. But she isn't down for long, as she drives a car across the mid-air divide between two buildings to crash through a window into Joong-san's lair. Choon-mo looks on, as his men are picked off during a titanic gun battle. She ventures upstairs and finds Joong-san alone and asks if he ever loved her. He insists he did, but claims the right to destroy her because he had made her. Sook-hee drops her gun and produces two blades and seeks to show him the kind of killer she had become. They crash through a window and keep struggling as they hang from a ledge before dropping into the street below. Sook-hee is hit by a car.

Undaunted, however, she smashes its windscreen and hurtles after the bus on which Joong-san has escaped. Clambering on to the bonnet, she somehow keeps the vehicle speeding in a straight line while she leaps on to the bus and breaks through the window in order to obliterate several more of Joong-san's oppos. With Choon-mo at the wheel of the careering bus, Sook-hee and Joong-san fight between the seats until she stabs Choon-mo so that the bus crashes and turns on its side. Staggering to her feet, she picks her way through the wreckage to the injured Joong-san. She raises an axe to kill him and he taunts her when he hesitates. As the camera gyrates around the couple, Sook-hee hears the whistled melody that had preceded her father's death and, finally knowing the truth, she buries the blade in Joong-san's skull. Sirens approach and the heavens open, as Sook-hee emerges from the bus with blood and a sardonic smile on her face. Looking directly into the lens, she lets out a manic laugh that continues to echo as the credits roll.

Given that this slick, but whoppingly contrived actioner takes homage to the point of blatant emulation, there seems little need for a Hollywood remake: but that's never stopped anyone before. Structurally similar to another tale of a gun-toting avenging angel, Sarmad Masud's My Pure Land, the flashbacking narrative mosaics its fragments together without a hint of character depth. But, while editor Seo Hun-mi deserves credit for retaining a semblance of plot logic, he must also be blamed with Jung and cinematographer Park Jung-hun for reducing choreographer Kwon Gui-duck's fight and chase sequences to shakicam obfuscations, whose self-consciously intricate dynamism deprives them of any visceral potency.

Just as the excess of crashing, banging and walloping generates precious little excitement, the performances lack the charisma to persuade the audience to care what happens to Sook-hee, Hyun-soo or even the pudgily adorable Eun-hye. One suspects this is Jung's judgement call, as Kim Ok-bin and Sung Joon have proved perfectly serviceable before. But, for all Kim's pugnacious exertions, she is upstaged here by the pitiless Shin Ha-kyun and the icily impassive Kim Seo-hyung, who respond to Sook-hee's demand to know why they have put her through so much suffering with equal indifference. Such misogyny might have been more impactful if Jung had allowed a little bleak comedy to seep into proceedings. But there's nothing ironic or drolly postmodern about the violence on show here. It's flashy and lurid and winds up being sadistically nasty. This might have mattered less if the story had been as compelling as it is convoluted. But, in the case of this overblown video game, it feels smugly gratuitous.

Two decades ago, debuting director Satoshi Kon took anime out of the realms of fantasy and into the darker reality of the psychological thriller with Perfect Blue. To mark the 20th anniversary of this landmark release, this adaptation of Yoshikazu Takeuchi's manga novel returned cinemas to expunge the memory of Toshiki Sato's undistinguished 2002 live-action reboot and to provide a timely insight into the treatment of women in the entertainment industry. But it is also available on disc and download.

After two and a half years at the top with the J-Pop girl group Cham, Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao) decides to leave to become an actress. Her last concert is disrupted by some delinquents, who are challenged by superfan Me-Mania (Masaaki Okura), who hands Mima an envelope at the end of the show. Manager Rumi Hidaka (Rica Matsumoto), who is herself a former singer, isn't convinced that Mima is making the right decision, especially as she is leaving a hit machine combo for a bit part in the crime drama series, Double Bind. But Mima feels a sense of relief, as she potters around a supermarket and returns home to chat to her mother on the phone. However, she is unsettled by the reference to the Mina's Room website in Me-Mania's letter, while she also receives an anonymous fax branding her a traitor for leaving Cham.

Rumi is amused that Mima has no idea what the Internet is, as she gazes with admiration at lead actress Eri Ochiai (Emi Shinohara), as her police psychiatrist solves a crime about a gender-conflicted serial killer who has been skinning his female victims. Agent Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji) wanders over to check his new star is ready for her one-line cameo and Mima sits nervously on the set watching Eri joke around with screenwriter Shibuya (Yoku Shioya) and station boss Tejima (Yosuke Akimoto). But, just as the camera starts to roll, Tadokoro opens a fan letter addressed to Mima and it explodes. She rushes over to see blood from a head wound soaking the paper, which contains a similar message to the fax.

As Tadokoro is only slightly injured and insists on forgetting the matter, Rumi advises Mima to put it behind her and shows her how to log on to the World Wide Web in order to access the Mima's Room fansite. She is confused by the concept of `double-clipping' and complains that she finds technology baffling. But Rumi persists and teaches her how to navigate her way around the information superhighway. Yet, when she manages to find the site, Mima is shocked to discover that its faux diary passages are disconcertingly well informed and she wonders who is writing it. Meanwhile, ex-bandmates Yukiko (Emiko Furukawa) and Rei (Shiho Niiyama) go from strength to strength and Rumi tries to persuade Tadokoro to pull Mima from Double Bind and put her back in Cham. But he is adamant and reveals that the TV people want to change Mima's image, so that she becomes edgier. However, her fans are sceptical about her acting talent and Me-Mania overhears them complaining in a bookshop and on the subway. Mima catches sight of him and is momentarily taken aback, as she takes a lift to Tadokoro's office.

Having already been against a plotline in which Mima's character poses for some salacious photographs, Rumi is aghast when Shibuya proposes a strip club rape scene. But Mima is intent on making it as an actress and agrees to do the scene. She feels uneasy on the studio set, even though the actor playing her assailant is kind to her, and stares into the lights while waiting for the cameras to be re-set. It all proves too much for Rumi, however, he flees the director's gallery in tears and Mima herself feels violated by the end of the take. She arrives home to find her goldfish have died and her Cham image taunts her from the mirror about making reckless decisions. Yet, having lashed out and knocked some possessions off a shelf and flopped on her bed, Mima looks up to see her fish swimming happily in their tank.

She does press interviews about her change of direction and swears that she is pleased with the way her transition is going. But Me-Mania keeps hearing negative comments and, as he taps away on his computer keyboard in his bedroom, Mima becomes increasingly spooked by the accuracy of the entries on the Mima's Room diary page. As she reads, her Cham self mocks her for being debased before floating through the window and down the streets like a malevolent fairy. Yet, while Mima is shaken by these hallucinations, she is terrified when Shibuya is brutally stabbed to death in a lift with one of Mima's old hits blarng out from a boombox. She suggests to Tadokoro that the murder might be related to the letter bomb, but he dismisses the theory out of hand.

Despite being conflicted about her new direction, Mima agrees to do a softcore photo shoot with Murano (Masashi Ebara). In her dressing-room Cham Mima admonishes her for having thrown away her wholesome fame and she claims she is going to rejoin the band and salvage their reputation. Equally dismayed by the topless shots he sees in a magazine, Me-Mania pictures the old Mima singing alongside Yukiko and Rei and he stares intently at the stage, as though he is able to see the phantom Mima back in the fold.

He also starts showing up on the Double Bind set, as the storylines begin to merge with Mima's living nightmare. One scene has her being reassured by a doctor that she isn't being stalked by her alter ego. Yet, when she pops into a radio station to watch Rei and Yukiko recording their new show, she sees Cham Mima sitting at the table with them and chases her through the building and out into the street before she wakes after being hit on a zebra crossing by a van being driven by Me-Mania.

Rumi brings her breakfast and they chat about her courage in committing to her new career. But she is distracted on set and messes up her lines. She wakes from what seems like the same nightmare and is surprised to find Rumi at the door with some pastries. When she apologises for not seeing much of her, Rumi reminds her that they had breakfasted the day before and Mima cuts her hand on her broken tea cup, as she tries to get a fix on what is real and what is illusory.

Once again, the TV storyline seems to overlap with real life and Mima wakes from another troubled night to learn that Murano has been stabbed in the eye during a pizza delivery. As she processes the news, Mima has a vague feeling that she might have been responsible for the attack and, having found a bloodied shirt in a bag in her wardrobe, she becomes increasingly unsure whether she can even trust herself. Yet, she continues filming, as the plot twists to make her character a schizophrenic who has been seeking to compensate for the death of her model sister by killing those responsible for her death. There is loud cheering on the set as Eri and Mima deliver their final lines and Eri jokes that she can stop pretending now.

While Rumi waits to drive Mima home, she returns to her dressing-room, only to have her path blocked by Me-Mania. He pulls a knife and reveals that he has been sending emails to the Mima's Room site in a bid to protect her Cham image. She asks if he killed Shibuya and Murano and he pushes her to the floor and rips open her blouse. Wriggling free, Mima hides in a prop room. But Me-Mania finds another entrance and they tumble on to a soundstage. He binds her feet and is preparing to rape her when Mima reaches for a hammer on the floor and crashes it into the side of his skull. Me-Mania collapses and, yet, when Rumi comes to find Mima and she goes to show her the corpse, there is no sign of her stalker.

Waking in a room that looks strangely similar to her own, but is in a completely different building, Mima tries to phone Takokoro. But he is dead alongside Me-Mania and Mima realises that Rumi has been behind her ordeal all along. She enters the room dressed as Cham Mima and tries to behave as though nothing is amiss. But she allows her anger at Mima corrupting her pop idol status to seep through and she declares that she has decided to kill the fake Mima in order to restore her lost innocence. As she lunges at Mima, Rumi stabs her in the shoulder and they tussle before Mima manages to escape on to the balcony. She jumps down on to a neighbouring roof and calls for help from the oblivious strangers below. Convinced she is Cham Mima, Rumi skips across the rooftops and pursues Mima as she clambers down to street level. However, when Mima rips off the Cham wig, Rumi becomes disorientated and staggers into the road. She mistakes the headlights of a truck for spotlights and is only saved by Mima dashing out in front of the hurtling vehicle, whose shocked driver jumps down from the cab to check they are both okay.

As the film ends, Mima visits Rumi in a psychiatric hospital, where she remains under the illusion that she is Cham Mima. Some nurses spot Mima as she leaves and wonders why such a star would come to a place like this. They conclude she must be a lookalike. But, as she removes her sunglasses and looks in the rearview mirror of her car, Mima is glad to be able to reveal that she is herself again.

Switching to video animation after the 1995 Kobe earthquake necessitated budget cuts, Satoshi Kon and screenwriter Sadayuki Murai decided to stray from the source material in order to explore the trivialisation of Japanese culture, the notion of performance and the preconceptions of female perfection. Kon was abetted by `special supervisor' Katsuhiro Otomo, who had helped boost the global profile of Japanimation with Akira (1988). But Kon would revisit the themes of illusion and reality in Millennium Actress (2002) and Paprika (2006) before his tragically early death at the age of 46 from pancreatic cancer in 2010.

Seen today, the graphics have a pleasing simplicity, as Kon employs key action techniques and rostrum camera movements to inject some dynamism into the largely static visuals. But, even though he occasionally comes close to overkill, he laudably takes dramatic and aesthetic chances in blurring the lines between what Mima sees, experiences and imagines, as she struggles to shed both her old self and fan impressions of who she is in reinventing her persona. Given the ongoing furore about the sexual harassment of actresses, the picture has an unexpected relevance. But, while nostalgics will enjoy seeing this again, one suspects that too much pixellated water has flowed under the anime bridge for this old school classic to win too many new converts.

Among Iceland's best-known crime and children's writers, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir made her name with six novels featuring investigative lawyer Þóra Guðmundsdóttir. But, in bringing Sigurðardóttir to the cinema screen for the first time, director Óskar Thór Axelsson has opted for the non-series bestseller, I Remember You, which introduces a supernatural element to a Nordic noir that slowly brings two seemingly unconnected storylines together.

During the opening credits, Halla (Júlía Hannam) vandalises the inside of a church before asking for forgiveness and hanging herself. Psychiatrist Freyr (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) has just moved from Reykjavík to Ísafjörður in Iceland's West Fjords and he is called by cop Dagný (Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir) to register the 71 year-old's suicide. He consoles the elderly man who found the body that hanging is a relatively painless way to die and thanks him for his kind words regarding the disappearance of his young son Benni (Guðni Geir Jóhannesson) three years earlier.

Meanwhile, Katrin (Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir) and her husband Garðar (Thor Kristjansson) sail to the abandoned village Hesteyri with their friend Lif (Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir) in order to renovate a house named Last Sight that has been unoccupied for 60 years with the intention of opening a bed and breakfast. The couple are mourning the loss of their baby and Lif hugs Katrin as they explore the empty house, which is next door to the doctor's property where Lif had spent the previous summer.

Back in Ísafjörður, Freyr returns from a jog to discover that Dagný is a neighbour. He invites her in for coffee and tells her about Benni, the eight year-old diabetic son who went missing while playing hide and seek. As he could not survive for long without his insulin, Freyr is certain that the boy is dead and Dagný smiles in sympathy. In Hesteyri, however, Lif keeps her counsel, as she shares a room with Katrin and Garðar and listens to them making love for the first time since their bereavement.

The following morning, Katrin rises early and goes for a walk. She finds a small cemetery and rings the bell in a monument to those lost at sea. But, as she crouches beside an unmarked grave edged with white stones, she thinks she hears a child's voice whispering `mum', as she examines a small hole in the turf. Returning to Last Sight, she finds Garðar and Lif in the kitchen discussing the need for running water and the fact that they will have to use a bucket until they can get the toilet working. Lif teases Garðar for being a city boy and he jokes with Katrin that her friend is crazy.

Following a decorating montage, we cut to Freyr working late in the hospital. The power goes off and, as he goes to investigate, a shadowy figure scurries along a corridor and he thinks he sees a child before the lights are restored. He ventures into the morgue and pulls out Halla's body to find that it is scarred with crosses. He informs Dagný, who interviews the dead woman's husband, Bjarni (Theodór Júlíusson), who remembers seeing blood on her nightgown, but who vehemently denies abusing her.

Dagný believes him and asks Freyr to look over details of another case connected to the Ísafjörður church, which had been transferred from Hesteyri after the village was abandoned in 1956. As he looks at old movies with Dagný and her assistant Veigar (Þór Tulinius), Freyr spots the same `unclean' graffiti on the church wall that he had noticed when Halla was discovered. Dagný also shows him a class photograph, in which Halla's face has been scratched out with a cross, along with several other classmates of a boy named involving Bernódus, who had gone missing just five days after the relocated church had been vandalised.

Freyr withholds the fact that he thought he saw someone prowling and Katrin also keeps quiet after she falls down some steps after getting up in the night having earlier tumbled into the creek where they store their beer in order to escape from a presence she felt hovering behind her. Garðar and Lif are puzzled when she returns with the missing cross from the cemetery plot, which she was fishing out of the water when she felt fell. However, they are more concerned with fixing the generator, as they only have lanterns and torches to see their way around, and making contact with the town to get Katrin some treatment for her injured leg.

Back in Ísafjörður, Freyr does some research in the archive and discovers that Bernódus (Arnar Páll Harðarson) was the son of a drunken church warden from Hesteyri and a monochrome flashback suggests that he carved crosses on his son's back because he blamed him for the death of his mother, Bergdis (the name on the cross that Katrin found). Dagný reveals that six of the eight children whose faces have been crossed out on the class photo have died in accidents over the last three years and she is convinced that some sort of sinister pattern is developing.

Spooked by a young boy staring at him from the back row of a children's choir, Freyr goes home to look at video footage of Benni and he has paused on the last CCTV image of him at a petrol station when Dagný calls with autopsy pictures of the first women to die from the class photo. Her back is also covered in crosses and Dagný reveals that she has tried to contact two of the surviving classmates. But one is Ursula (Ragnheidur Steindórsdóttir), a schizophrenic in Freyr's care, while the other is a farmer who isn't answering his phone. The wonder whether they were all involved in some kind of religious cult, but also consider the fact that Bernódus might still be alive and is systematically killing everyone who had bullied him at school.

Waking up to find that Garðar and Lif have gone to get a phone signal, Katrin hears a noise downstairs and sees wet footprints on the floor. She thinks the sound is coming from beneath a trapdoor and she clambers into a small cellar space, only for the door to close on top of her. As she looks around the confined space, she sees the covered corpse of a child with a torn snapshot of its mother in its hand. She also finds an exercise book in a satchel and flicks through pages of drawings of an angry face and a class posing for a photograph. As she sees the word `unclean', however, she feels someone behind her and is screaming for help when Lif and Garðar return. The latter finds the body and they decide to move to the doctor's house because they no longer feel safe in their own property.

Meanwhile, Freyr and Dagný have gone to visit the farmer. Peering through the window, Freyr sees a body and, when the sheepdog rushes in and starts barking at the foot of the stairs, he goes to investigate and finds a room whose wall is covered with press cuttings relating to Benni's disappearance. He is still shaken when he goes to see Ursula in her care home. She stares into the distance, but he shows her the class photo and she whispers something about Benni being below and everything being green. Dagný has to calm him down when he shouts at Ursula to explain what she means, but she lapses back into silence.

Katrin also loses her cool in Hesteyri when she goes to make the beds in the doctor's house and finds the white wooden cross from the creek on the landing. She tosses it outside and accuses Garðar and Lif of playing cruel games with her. That night, she dreams of looking at the whole snapshot she found in the dead boy's hand, only to wake up and go for a glass of water. But this is also part of the dream, as she returns to the bedroom to see a skinny kid sitting on the bed and she wakes with a start as she drops her glass. She begs Garðar to get her home and she snaps at him when he says she is still stressed after the stillbirth of their son. Glaring at him, Katrin asks whether he had an affair with Lif while scouting Hesteyri the previous summer and he admits it happened without them meaning it to because he felt his marriage was over.

Freyr's own relationship had fallen apart during the search for Benni and he receives a frosty welcome from his ex-wife Sara (Elma Stefania Agustsdottir) when he returns to consult the files they have stored in Benni's room. He request a meeting with his son's friend Oli (Bjarni Kristbjörnsson), who had mentioned a green submarine in his testimony. However, he has learning difficulties and Freyr loses his temper when he refuses to answer his questions. He becomes even more frustrated when Sara introduces him to Elias (Sweinn Geirsson), a lawyer who explains that Benni has been in touch with him to reveal that he is trapped between two worlds. Aghast that Sara could believe such nonsense, Freyr scoffs at the notion that his son will become so angry at his body not being found that he will start to endanger those closest to him. He pauses momentarily when Elias mentions Bernódus before stalking out.

Katrin is also in a foul mood in Hesteyri and glowers at Lif when she comes down for breakfast. She can't believe that Garðar has admitted to their affair, but he says he was selective with his information and they kiss. As they do, a hooded figure throws a stone through the window and they chase him across the field to a disused factory. Much of the masonry is crumbling and Lif wanders inside and screams on running into their assailant. But, when Garðar rushes to her side, the chimney stack collapses on top of them and Katrin comes running to see if they are okay. Garðar is dead, but the bloodied Lif is still alive and Katrin takes her phone to call for help. She climbs to the highest point above the bay and reaches up for a signal. But she sees text messages between Garðar and Lif and, having discovered that they were expecting a baby, she leaves the phone on the ground to return to the factory to look down on the deceased Lif with grim satisfaction.

Unable to sleep, Freyr goes for a jog at 4am and sees a hooded figure on the rain-soaked street. He chases after him into a back alley and sees the shell of an old boat. Looking through the porthole, he is surprised to see Ursula and he breaks in to speak to her. Her back is covered in crosses and she mumbles that Bernódus isn't always so cruel to her. She also reveals that she saw him stowaway under a green tarpaulin on the ferry boat from Hesteyri and never told a soul that he had escaped his torment. Freyr asks about Benni and she laments that he had woken Bernódus up and that was when the trouble began.

Calling Dagný to bring an ambulance, Freyr breaks down when he tells her that he thinks Bernódus is trying to help him. He sobs on her shoulder, as he fears that he is going as mad as his patients. But Katrín is also suffering, as she left her coat covering Lif and she huddles in a blanket because she can't get the fire to light. She clambers down into the cellar and turns the pages of the exercise book before lying down next to the corpse. As she closes her eyes, she feels the boy reach over and brush the hair off her cheek and she feels comforted, as the grey-faced waif lies back down behind her.

Waking with a start, Freyr takes a call from Dagný, who has been sent a drawing of a green vessel by Oli's mother. Suddenly, she has a moment of inspiration and asks Freyr to see the CCTV footage of the petrol station again and spots Garðar, Katrín and Lif leaving the diner. They are driving a car with a trailer and Dagný looks through some photographs on her laptop and reaches the conclusion that Benni must have slipped into their trailer and been taken to the island. She explains that Lif and Garðar perished in an accident at the factory and that there was no sign of Katrín. When she shows Freyr a photo of the house they had gone to renovate, he sees a green sceptic tank standing outside.

As they cross by boat, Freyr holds back the dread that continues to gnaw at him as they traverse the field to the house. He watches as two men unscrew the lid and look inside and can barely bring himself to do the same. Needing to be alone, Freyr goes inside the house and thinks he hears a noise upstairs. There is no one there, but he feels a presence and is about to open the trapdoor to the cellar when Dagný enters and he jumps up and leaves. As the stretcher carrying the body is taken to the jetty, Benni stands in his blue coat and looks back at Katrín and Bernódus, as they watch from the window. He takes her hand and she stares impassively, as she has the child she wanted, albeit in an afterlife limbo.

Nicolas Roeg's adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Don't Look Now (1973) casts a long shadow over this simmeringly unsettling saga. Those familiar with Yrsa Sigurðardóttir's book will know best whether Óskar Thór Axelsson and co-scenarist Ottó Geir Borg have done a good job in protecting the plot's secrets or have left more loose ends than the author intended. But we never quite get to the bottom of what Ursula actually saw back in 1956 and only Sara will know either why she bothered or why she waited so long to introduce Freyr to Elias and the idea that Benni has been trying to contact them from the other side. Moreover, we never find out who was responsible for the cross killings, which wind up becoming a teasingly grim MacGuffin if the body in the cellar does conclusively contradict Ursula's unreliable recollections.

Ambiguities aside, the slickest element of the picture is undoubtedly its structure and the artful manner in which editor Kristján Loðmfjörð conceals the fact that the narratives time frames are not concurrent. Jakob Ingimundarson's sombre views of the bleak landscape and Heimir Sverrisson's atmospheric interiors and the ominous groans of Frank Hall's score also reinforce the brooding sense of unease that permeates proceedings that move with a satisfying steadiness that regrettably makes the final revelations seem a tad rushed and ever so slightly anti-climactic.

As the short-fused shrink under unbearable strain, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson is admirably anti-heroic, while Sara Dögg Ásgeirsdóttir is splendidly discreet as the dogged cop. Yet, while Thor Kristjansson, Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir and Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir do what's required of them, their characters are so sketchily delineated that it isn't always easy to empathise with their situation, even after the home truths start to emerge. But the expression on Guðmundsdóttir's face in the final close-up at the window will linger even with those sceptical about the efficacy of the supernatural aspects, regardless of how creepy they are.