VIDEOPHOBIA
dir. Daisuke Miyazaki, 2019
Japan. 88 min. In Japanese w/English subs.

Ai (Tomona Hirota) is a young twentysomething adrift in Osaka, an aspiring actress barely making ends meet between shifts dressing as a mascot at her local shopping district and gigs as an erotic webcam performer. Following a one-night stand with an unremarkable cosmetics salesman, her life is thrown into chaos when she discovers that a video of their encounter, recorded without her knowledge or consent, has been posted online. The deeper she investigates, the more she unravels, growing increasingly paranoid in the presence of technology and other people.

Like VIDEODROME for the iPhone era, Daisuke Miyazaki’s stark techno-thriller takes our obsession with and dependency on modern technology and spins it into all our worst fears come to life. How do we maintain a sense of self when so much of our memory has already been ceded to our devices? What metrics are there to determine what on the internet is truly real and what is not, especially in this era of deep-fakes and A.I.-generated imagery? What lengths will Ai go to to correct the injustice of this video living on into digital perpetuity? Or is her only option to see the woman as somebody else.