Review of Serial Experiments Lain (1998)
Modern Japan. The dubious heroine receives email from another girl her age, who committed suicide but claims to live on in the Wired. What if the Internet was more like a parallel reality?
Surreal, intellectual cyberpunk, like David Lynch minus most of the sex. Lain is fundamentally wrong about the social effects of the Internet, both as it existed in 1998 and as it would evolve, but as an artistic take, it’s still good.
References here: Texhnolyze (2003), Belle (2021).
moving picture Japanese production animation fiction series cyberpunk