There are films that we watch and films that, inexorably, watch us. Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue is a prominent member of the second category: a prismatic abyss that reflects our own post-modern anxieties with the precision of a sharp scalpel. To dismiss it as mere “anime” would be a categorical error, a critical heresy akin to confining “2001: A Space Odyssey” to the children's science fiction section. No, Kon's debut film is a psychological thriller that gets under your skin, an essay on the fragmentation of identity in the age of mass celebrity, and above all, a chilling prophecy about the advent of our digital present, carved in the amber of 1997.

The premise, on the surface, is almost a narrative archetype. Mima Kirigoe, idol of a J-pop trio called CHAM!, decides to abandon frilly skirts and pastel microphones to pursue her dream of becoming a “serious” actress. It's a classic rite of passage, the chrysalis yearning to become a butterfly. But Kon, adapting Yoshikazu Takeuchi's novel, is not interested in metamorphosis; he is obsessed with dissecting the process, with the terror of the chrysalis who, looking in the mirror, no longer sees herself but a smiling ghost still wearing her old clothes. Mima's transition is not a liberation, but a descent into a labyrinth of mirrors where every reflection is a hostile version of herself.

Kon's genius lies in the way he translates this inner collapse into cinematic language. His famous transitions, the match cuts that blend scenes, dreams, and film sets into an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, are not merely a stylistic quirk. They are the epistemological engine of the film. The viewer is forced to share Mima's bewilderment, unable to discern reality from fiction, her life from the script of the dark soap opera in which she stars, “Double Bind.” In this, Kon reveals himself to be a direct descendant not so much of other animators as of directors such as Nicolas Roeg, whose manipulation of time and perception in “Don't Look Now” created an architecture of mourning and foreboding. But if Roeg fragmented time, Kon shatters the self, constructing a montage that is, in effect, the visual representation of a dissociative disorder.

The film is a close dialogue with the masters of psychological thrillers. Hitchcock's shadow looms everywhere, from “Psycho,” with its split psyche, to “Vertigo,” with its obsessive re-creation of an ideal female image. But Kon takes the discourse a step further. Mima's doppelgänger, her idolized version that haunts her, is not just a projection of her guilt or nostalgia; she is an almost autonomous entity, fueled by the gaze of others. Here emerges the deepest parallel, that with the concept of “gaze” that runs through cinema from Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera to Powell's Peeping Tom. Mima is perpetually observed: by adoring fans, by her deformed stalker (a “Me-Mania” who is the grotesque embodiment of toxic fandom), by producers who push her into increasingly degrading scenes, and, ultimately, by us. Kon uses the medium itself, animation, often fetishized and consumed by an otaku culture he knew well, to launch a fierce critique of that very culture, in a meta-textual short circuit of rare power.

And then there is the prophecy. In 1997, the web was a Wild West of 56k modems and Geocities pages. Yet Perfect Blue anticipates the era of social media with terrifying lucidity. The website “Mima's Room,” an online diary written by her stalker with intimate and disturbing details, is the dark ancestor of a Facebook profile or Instagram feed curated by someone else. It demonstrates how our digital persona can take on a life of its own, a perceived “truth” that ends up overshadowing and invalidating our lived experience. Mima reads that she bought milk before she even went to the supermarket, and doubt creeps in: who is the real Mima? The one who lives her life or the one who is described online? It is the same question that Philip K. Dick asked throughout his literary career: what remains of the human when reality becomes a negotiable construct? Perfect Blue is a Dick novel disguised as anime, a descent into the paranoia of an identity stolen not by androids, but by bits and pixels.

This fragmentation of the self, this dissociation between the public and private selves, finds an unexpected echo not in cinema, but in modernist literature. Mima's inner struggle, her stream of consciousness tormented by the voices of the past and the pressures of the present, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's sensibility. Just as Clarissa Dalloway wanders around London constructing her identity through the memories and perceptions of others, so Mima wanders around a hallucinatory Tokyo, her essence defined and torn apart by the gazes of thousands of strangers. Both are women performing a role—the perfect hostess, the perfect ex-idol—while inside a battle for authenticity rages. It is a risky analogy, of course, but one that reveals the universality of the theme Kon deals with: the prison of an imposed identity.

The production of the film itself is imbued with a certain irony. Kon, who came from the world of manga alongside Katsuhiro Otomo, wanted to create something that moved away from the stereotypes of animation. The budget was tight, and many of the most ingenious visual solutions arose from the need to overcome technical limitations, pushing Kon to a formal inventiveness that would become his trademark. The result is a work that transcends its medium, a thriller so psychologically dense and visually sophisticated that it has been plundered by flesh-and-blood directors. Darren Aronofsky famously bought the rights to remake the film in order to recreate the bathtub scene shot-for-shot in “Requiem for a Dream,” and the entire narrative structure of “Black Swan,” with its ballerina losing her mind under the pressure of performance, is a debt so obvious that it borders on homage.

Perfect Blue is a macabre dance between Eros and Thanatos, between the desire to be seen and the fear of being consumed. It is the story of how celebrity culture, amplified out of all proportion by the digital echo, can become a process of self-cannibalism. The brutal and desperate final twist is not a simple plot twist, but the logical, heartbreaking conclusion of an investigation into projection and the desire for possession. The question of who is the real executioner and who is the real victim dissolves into a moral ambiguity that leaves the viewer breathless. When, in the last, liberating shot, a Mima finally in control of herself looks in the rearview mirror and declares, “No, I am the real one,” it is not just the end of her nightmare. It is a challenge thrown down to us, the viewers of the 21st century, perpetually connected and constantly on stage. In a world of avatars, filters, and personal narratives, that question—who is the real one?—has become the existential question of our age. And the Perfect Blue of the title is no longer the color of an innocent sky, but the cold, relentless glow of a screen staring at us, waiting for an answer.