Kengo (Kento Hayashi) is a man in step with the times. He never leaves his apartment without a face mask and gloves. When he comes home, he scrubs his hands furiously with soap and gets busy with the disinfectant.
Granted, the protagonist of Kensaku Kakimoto’s “Parasite in Love” is wrestling with extreme germaphobia, rather than the now-familiar reality of life during a pandemic. He’s also working on a computer virus that will unleash global chaos on Christmas Eve — but in this day and age, who can blame him?
Kengo meets his match when he crosses paths with Hijiri (Nana Komatsu), a high schooler who’s suffering from a debilitating case of scopophobia, the fear of being seen. She’s terrified of looking people in the eyes, and wears a chunky set of headphones to shut out the world.