Directed by Satoshi Kon. Written by Seishi Minakami and Satoshi Kon
Watching Paprika is like stepping onto a merry-go-round stuck on full throttle, its bright lights, chariots, horses bending then blurring as you’re pulled along at breakneck speed. You get 30 seconds where you think you’re in for a police mystery, then all pretense at normalcy melts away and for the following 90 minutes, you don’t know what the next 10 seconds will bring.
Accurately describing Paprika is difficult, but the bare facts are simple enough: A company producing a dream sharing machine has its technology stolen and people begin losing their minds as their subconscious is drawn into a common dream by an unknown actor. With the help of a police detective, the team behind the technology must seek out the culprit and put things right, both in the real world and the one of dreams – knowing which is which isn’t as easy as you might think.
This is selling Kon’s movie short, because Paprika is lightning in a bottle. It features jaded friends, split personas, burning hearts, walking refrigerators, talking dolls, men who inflate until they burst, giant frogs, all in an unceasing deluge. Tech bros gush over generative AI’s ability to “create” out of thin air, but long before that, there was the mind of Satoshi Kon.
Unfettered imagination pours out of every scene, and to harness and channel it all is no mean feat. Still, to watch Paprika is like holding the leash of a strong, eager dog yanking you down the block.The twisty nature of its narrative can keep you wrong-footed and playing catch-up, but when what’s on the screen is so disarming in its novelty and impressive in how confident it is in its expression, you cease to care. If you give yourself over to Paprika, there’s not a dull second.
Mind-bending story aside, the technical ability on display is stunning as well, with animation worth pausing for to truly take in the level of detail and composition some of these frames have, or to bask a little in the atmosphere the background animation provides, be it a dimly lit bar contained within cyberspace or a haunted carnival at dusk.
Paprika is a love letter to collective creative endeavor and the very act of creation, a letter it writes in between the lines of its dizzying story of corporate interest imposing itself on creativity and homogenizing the experience for us all. It also writes a love letter to cinema, doing so out in the open by ways of a police detective’s reconciliation with his past where references to classic movies and filmmaking terminology are used to help us understand the film and the power cinema holds on the imagination.
This latter, rather tender, element provides an emotional anchor for a hurricane of movie whose ideas and execution easily bowl you over. With the many strings Kon is trying to pull, its inclusion doesn’t feel entirely organic at times, but as Paprika arrives at its destination, the story of a man falling back in love with the movies provides a satisfying conclusion to a film that pays homage to the medium’s past while pushing its boundaries for the betterment of its future.
Mikkel Frederiksen 