The Garden of Sinners: Overlooking View

Girls are jumping from a building. Several suicides happen within a few months, and the falling bodies seem to hang in the air for a moment. Shiki Ryougi works with a small office that investigates unusual events; she has just come out of a two year coma and her eye sees death, perceiving on everything the lines along which, if cut, that thing will cease to exist. She goes to the building. Ei Aoki directs. It is a ufotable production, from Kinoko Nasu's novel. The film is the first of a series of seven. The parts were shown in cinemas and do not run in chronological order; this first one in fact sits somewhere in the middle of the timeline, and the characters' pasts open in later films. The visual work is what is most discussed about the series: light, glass surfaces and night cityscapes are worked in detail. The music is by Yuki Kajiura. The narrative explains nothing directly; terms and relationships are used without introduction and the viewer is expected to assemble them across later parts. It is short, about fifty minutes. The idea at the centre is a relationship with death itself; Shiki is neither human nor not, and that uncertainty is the real subject of the rest of the series. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese animation and dark supernatural mystery. Who it is not for: watched alone it is incomplete, the telling is deliberately closed, and it requires committing to the series.