Serial Experiments Lain ★★★☆☆

Although I had seen Serial Experiments Lain before unlike a lot of terminally online autistic trans women it was not that formative for me and had not left a very strong impression. Interesting to revisit and both more strange and more straightforward than I remembered. It’s rather clear looking at it now how much of the dreamlike pacing, odd tangents and philosophical musings are, as much as anything else, a function of a budget stretched to breaking point. The narrative being put on complete pause in favour of a slideshow of photographs about conspiracy theories is not just a sign of the narrative going off the deep end, but a very obvious sign that the studio has run out of money. Once the show does play its hand I was surprised by how, if not straightforward or unambiguous, quite open it is on the nature of Lain and how she came to be. But Chiaki J. Konaka is more interested in questions than answers and so much of what happens is left to be a strange, hauntingly beautiful picture. The blood-splattered shadows that appear across the show stand out to me in particular, a reminder of everything lurking unseen all around us, of networks, violence and human connections.