Directed by Daisuke Miyazaki • Drama • With Sumire Ashina • 2019 • 89 minutes
Ai (a super Tomona Hirota) haunts the streets of Osaka dressed as a mascot. After going home with a stranger, she wakes up to find footage of their intimate encounter uploaded to a porn site. As all systems of recourse and remedy fail her and her sense of dislocation and alienation intensifies, Ai resorts to a strange solution.
Videophobia unfolds as paranoid techno-thriller about identity, set on the backstreets of an industrial and multicultural Osaka captured here in beautiful, stark black-and-white. Concerns with obsessive image-making and issues of surveillance and consent in the digital age are embodied in the plight of a young woman from the city’s Koreatown; in an eerie film about the self – watching us as much as we watch it.
Up Next in Beautiful Horrors (Collection)
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Fish & Cat
Directed by Shahram Mokri • Drama • With Ainaz Azarhoush, Abed Abest • 2013 • 142 minutes
A group of attractive young Iranian kite-flying enthusiasts gather at a dismal lake, near a restaurant where two sinister characters straight out of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE are serving up grisly fare in Ira...
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Alena
Directed by Daniel di Grado • Drama • With Amalia Holm, Molly Nutley, Felice Jankell • 2017 • 83 minutes
With a traumatic event in her recent past, Alena transfers to a posh private all-girls school where her decidedly lower class roots makes her an outsider. While a gang of mean rich girls are ...
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Alleluia
Directed by Fabrice Du Welz • Drama • With Laurent Lucas, Lola Dueñas • 2014 • 95 minutes
Based on notorious real-life “lonely hearts killers” who make victims of their romantic liaisons, Alleluia is a dark and fascinating love-story-gone-wrong from Belgian horror maverick Fabrice du Welz. Miche...
