BLAME!

In the far future humanity is lost inside the structure it built. The city goes on producing itself and nobody can stop it; the levels run on forever and the voids are kilometres deep. People hide in small groups, and the city's security system, the Safeguard, treats them as unauthorised and kills them. A man called Killy has been walking this structure for years, looking for a gene that would restore access to the system. The film's strength is scale. The story is simple and the characters say little; the effect comes from the space, unlit corridors, architecture grown with no regard for people, and the same grey repeating everywhere. Hiroyuki Seshita directed for Polygon Pictures. The source is Tsutomu Nihei's manga, and Nihei consulted on the production. Netflix distributed it. The adaptation takes a portion of the source rather than the whole: the section set in the village was chosen and the manga's wider story narrowed to fit. Who it is for: anyone drawn to bleak science fiction, design at architectural scale, and Nihei's universe. Who it is not for: anyone wanting explanation. The film says almost nothing about how the world got this way, facial movement in the computer animation is limited, and the characters' histories are left blank.