There can be few handier means of evading the violence-in-creative-endeavours police than dreaming up a Japanese anime series. Take any flavour of depraved killer you like – katana wielder; callous, cigarette-puffing sniper; axe-inspired slayer; baseball player pitching high-speed cannonballs; psycho sledgehammer boy – and use them to populate the nightmare narrative of a schoolgirl who turns vigilante to rub out zombie-like villains. Translation: create High-Rise Invasion (Netflix).
Stuck in some kind of waking dream, Yuri Honjo enters the fray trapped atop a skyscraper while trying to evade the flashing blade of a bloodstained caveman in a creepy “smiley-face” mask. And he’s just the first in a series of psycho killers in identical facial disguise.
All are subject to mind control exercised by some unseen power ordering them to murder the maskless, or drive them to despair so they chuck themselves off the tops of tall buildings. With their ground floors out of bounds, the high-rises are linked by jungle-style rope bridges.
Yuri – suddenly an expert with an gun – becomes an avenger, wiping out smiley-faced monsters while searching for her lost brother and telling a potentially treacherous fellow female target of the psycho brigade: “You’re a killer, but you don’t seem like a bad person.” Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose.
What might we discern amid the mayhem of this 12-part first series, with its elevated blood-and-gore squelch factor? Modern life, it appears, can make brutes of us, blotting out all self-awareness and giving us a grievous case of misanthropy. Alienation and victimisation don’t help much either.
And treading carefully when crossing rope bridges is advisable.
Yuri discovers that one objective in what increasingly comes to resemble a video game, with the occasional heavy-metal soundtrack, is to become a god of this “parallel realm”, which by definition should render a player immortal. In the meantime, mask-free humans will do anything to survive, she finds, however violent their antagonists, but preferably not by sinking to their levels of depravity.
Based on the manga of the same name, by Tsuina Miura and Takahiro Oba, and produced by studio Zero-G, High-Rise Invasion could be interpreted as a safety valve for prisoners of lockdown trapped in apartments in the sky. With Yuri and company on hand, any violent fantasies can be fulfilled vicariously.
Dickinson: who knew costume dramas could be so much fun?
Back in the 19th century, another heroine, American poet Emily Dickinson, was busy dealing with terrors of her own – the kind that come with the potential exposure to public adulation thanks to one’s artistic gifts.
Dickinson, it transpires, was so adept at avoiding any sort of fame during her lifetime that she remained largely unknown until afterwards … when she was recognised as a towering presence in American letters. It is to the poet’s evolving eccentricities, passion for her craft and upbringing in well-to-do New England that series two of Dickinson (Apple TV+, now streaming) devotes much of its time.
But fear not: this is no dour traipse through a self-sabotaged literary career. Fans of her verse can revel in its on-screen manifestation in scrolling graphics as the words are spoken by Hailee Steinfeld, as Dickinson, working feverishly at her desk to produce what would amount to roughly 1,800 poems.
Elsewhere, there are laughs to be had from a droll production that jauntily features rap and soft rock in its soundtrack, as well as matching anachronisms in the dialogue, which stretches to “ass kicking”, “so cool” and “awesome, bro”.
And then there are regular scene-stealing appearances from Ally McBeal alumna Jane Krakowski as Dickinson’s mother. Who knew costume dramas could be this much fun?
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