The first film from Satoshi Kon (Sennen Joyū/Millennium Actress (2001), Tokyo Godfathers (2003), Mōsō Dairinin/Paranoia Agent (2004), Paprika (2006)) may be less polished than some of his later work but it still packs quite the punch even after all these years. Inspired as much by the Italian horrors of Mario Bava and Dario Argento as by his anime contemporaries, it’ a mind twisting tale of fractured identities, paranoia and the corrosive effects of the media on its participants.

Like the later Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue begins disarmingly as a science fiction film, a Power Rangers like tokusatsu that turns out to be part of an elaborate stage show for the hugely pop band CHAM!. One of their singers, Mima Kirigoe (Junko Iwao in the original Japanese, Ruby Marlowe in the English language version), decides to leave the band and try her hand at an acting career, supported by her manager and former pop-idol Rumi Hidaka (Rica Matsumoto/Wendee Lee) and her agent Tadokoro (Shinpachi Tsuji/Gil Starberry). She lands a small role in the television detective drama Double Bind but some of her fans react badly to her change of career, one in particular, a stalker calling himself Me-Mania (Masaaki Okura/Bob Marx), taking it very hard. Mima finds a website called Mima’s Room, an early blog that sems to have been written by herself though he has no knowledge of it. Her acting career takes her into darker territory when she’s persuaded to take part in a rape scene and she starts to suffer emotionally, become increasingly psychotic and unable to tell what’s real and what’s fantasy anymore. And then the bodies start piling up as Mima disappears completely into her fictional world and she loses grasp of who she is completely…

Perfect Blue is the ideal film to show those who still cling stubbornly to the increasingly untenable notion that anime is a boys-only medium, obsessed with transforming robots, intergalactic violence and tentacle sex. It’s a mature and thought-provoking film that challenges preconceptions at every turn. With its internet stalkers, loss of identity and obsession with the superficialities of pop culture, it seems horribly prescient now and in the wake of the #metoo movement its central thesis about the commodification of young women in the entertainment industry seems positively prophetic. A brutal rape scene is nastier and more upsetting than the misogynistic trash seen in hentai and the fact that it’s all a scene for a television series, set amid the mundane reality of retakes and pauses to reset camera angles, doesn’t soften the impact at all.

The film is primarily concerned with the peculiar Japanese phenomenon of the “idoru,” the highly controlled pop star – of either sex though there are more women than men – whose lives and talents are owned by the media giants and whose every waking moment is run by their paymasters. Until they no longer fit of course, at which point they are simply replaced by someone new, younger and prettier. Mima’s “people” are seemingly supportive of her risky move to abandon her pop music career but as her acting takes her don increasingly dark roads, with a way back seeming increasingly unlikely, she’s told in no uncertain terms that “no-one likes a pop idol with a tarnished reputation.” Mima is no longer her own person, she’s a product that seems to be reaching the end of its shelf life.

As a consequence, Mima becomes consumed by self-loathing as her life and career spirals out of control and she can no longer be sure who she is any more, nor how much of what she’s experiencing is real at all. Fact and fantasy merge on many levels as Mima drifts in and out of reality, the fantasy of her film roles and the hallucinations that overwhelm her. She’s often seen reflected in mirrors and other reflective surfaces or on television screens, an alternative version of herself that eventually comes to life to taunt her. Mima’s only line in her debut television appearance, “excuse me, who are you?” is one that resonates throughout Perfect Blue as her personality splinters to the point where no-one – not Mima nor the audience – know which version of her is real.

There are multiple echoes throughout the film, and not just the different facets of Mima’s self. Scenes often repeat with slight variation, while others anticipate later moments such that multiple viewings became almost mandatory to tease out all the details and levels of meaning. A dazzlingly complex film, Perfect Blue disarmingly leaps backwards and forwards between many layers of perceived reality and, like Mima, the viewer is in danger of becoming lost in the tangle if concentration is allowed to drop for even a second.

As befits a film that owes as much to Brian De Palma and Dario argento as it does to anyone on the contemporary anime scene, Perfect Blue is often extremely gory and transgressive. But it’s an unusual “slasher” film in that the victims are exclusively male and the female characters survive – physically at least if not all of them making it through psychologically intact – to the end. The audacity of a mid-story twist is strangely abandoned in favour of a more mundane but still effective denouement that ends ambiguously with Mima – whichever version of Mima she is – turning to camera and announcing “no, I’m the real thing.”

Perfect Blue was made when the internet was still very much in its infancy so the new-fangled technology plays a central role in the story and Mima (and the audience) is given a lengthy explanation how to use a browser. It’s naivete is almost charming in a world where even the youngest child uses the internet without a second’s thought about how it all works.

Perfect Blue certainly made an impact on director Darren Aronofsky who bought the rights to the film with eye to remaking it. He never did of course, but he did later make the thematically similar Black Swan (2010). He originally bought the rights so that he could remake the bathtub scene in Requiem for a Dream (2000) and although he has always refused to cite Kon’s film as an influence on Black Swan, it’s clearly there for all to see. Another fan was real-life pop star Madonna who used a clip from the film during a video interlude during her 2001 Drowned World Tour.