Another Sixteen Screams For Halloween: Day 13 (Paprika)

For last year's spooky marathon, I went back to a film I'd only seen once before. It was a film which had left a mark on my psyche, a harrowing and haunting anime. That film was Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, and it remains just as terrifying as it ever was. In chatting with a streamer friend of mine, they compared it to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and I can definitely see the similarities. Both are quite intense. I put all this upfront to say that Paprika, another film of Kon's, is less intense than those nightmares. Nevertheless, it manages to delve into some of the same subject matters, and what remains is more unsettling and eerie than outright terrifying. It's still a fantastic film, barring like one caveat I have with it, so let's talk about it.

Using Fire Walk With Me as a springboard lets us make a good starting point. David Bowie's one scene in the theatrical cut of that movie is a fractured disjointed mess of images, but one of the many poetic things he says during it is that we live inside a dream. That's Paprika, through and through. Duality is blurred within the confines of this film. The waking world and the dreaming world merge, and you're never quite sure if you're in a dream or not. Dreams themselves seem to fulfill the old Steven Moffat adage of thinking for themselves, and invading the world to blur the lines. The mundane and the bizarre mix, the world shifting its state and us shifting our understanding of things as it happens.

Perfect Blue had a duality within it, the image of the perfect idol juxtaposed with the ordinary performer enduring the psychological terrors. So too is there a duality between Dr. Atsuko Chiba, working on dream diving tech, and Paprika, her other self who delves in the world of dreams and helps dreamers come to terms with themselves. Even this is blurred, as by the end of the film dreams and reality have merged, so Chiba and Paprika exist within the same space. The spirit self coming forth alongside the true self. This merging of selves is what brings about something beautiful. Paprika works as a dream-diving psychologist, hopping into the confusing mess of images in a person's mind to see what it says about them in reality, their worries and their guilts, in order to help them grow and change. It's police captain Konakawa who benefits from this in the film at first, a recurring dream about giving chase to someone being his mind's way of working with feelings of loss and grief from a dead friend of his who was always one step ahead in life.

The blurring of dream and reality helps not just Konakawa deal with his traumas and heal from them thanks to Paprika, but Paprika herself helps to make her own true self in the waking world grow and change for the better. Chiba's relationship and feelings for her colleage, Dr. Tokita (who's the film's one bum note, sorry to say: he's a large man and the film has some cheap shots at the expense of him being fat) are able to blossom and grow as she changes from the blurred reality of dreams becoming real. Paprika's a strange film, reminding me of David Lynch in the way it deals with the hazy ambiguity of dreaming and what it means to us, and some of it is spooky and unsettling enough for a spooky marathon. Either way, as Satoshi Kon's last feature film, it was one hell of a sendoff. It's worth your time, so give it a watch... and dream a little dream, every now and thena.