‘#Mito’: Sharp satire riffs on the dark side of AI and social media

Are we all slipping into the uncanny valley between the human and the digital? Daisuke Miyazaki’s biting satire “#Mito” poses that question with a title protagonist who embodies it. As played to striking and unsettling effect by Tina Tamashiro, Mito Yamane has a gaze that is searching and blank, a beauty flawless and inert. Who is she actually? Even she doesn’t know or particularly care, as long as her numbers are trending up.

Mito is an internet influencer that can attract millions of social media subscribers for putting out an image considered cute or cool — however the zeitgeist defines those terms at the moment. To fans, her life away from her smartphone camera is not so important; they are happier with their fantasies, like children dressing their Barbie dolls for the world of their imaginations.

Based on Miyazaki’s original script, “#Mito” offers an intimate, clear-sighted look at an influencer’s life and career — the two being inseparable in Mito’s case — stripped of surface glamour and glitz, if with comically dreamy stylistics.

In its last act, however, the film subverts common sense with a dark, humorous twist while reflecting our scary new reality in which AI images spread inexorably through social media and overshadow their flesh-and-blood models. For those being eclipsed, though, it’s no laughing matter. For those viewing, it’s a fresh, smart take on a phenomenon too often treated simply as a joke.

When we first meet Mito, she is living the influencer’s dream with a multitude of followers who shower her with adulatory comments (“You energize me!”) for her fashion sense, make-up tips and general wonderfulness. With her even-keeled sister, Miho (Hina Yukawa), serving as adviser and confidante, Mito seems to take it all as her due, though she is also no self-deluded narcissist; she views her situation, crazed fans included, with a cool-eyed remove and fatalism. “I’ve heard that the odds of this world not being virtual are one in a billion,” she says.

Meanwhile, the film shows us the hustle needed to win the influencer game through Miho’s slick, insecure manager, Kiyoshi (Yu Iwaba). Wanting to boost Mito to superstar status, he scrambles to find new revenue streams. A role in an internet drama is one, but Mito performs an emotion-drenched scene without any emotion, which is both funny and oddly effective given her character’s detached state. She also refuses to cringe when a haughty veteran actress (Yumi Adachi in full-bore Joan Crawford mode) dismisses her thespian skills and instead responds with a devastating put-down.

Kiyoshi then ropes a willing Mito into a scheme to make her the face of a digital mask filter on a popular Chinese site and, hopefully, a global icon. But once her infinitely replicable “Mito mask” starts being used for nefarious purposes, her “pure” image craters.

She is a victim, but to critics who demand she take responsibility for the ensuing chaos, it doesn’t matter. And Mito becomes totally lost in the digital crowd. Think Elvis becoming indistinguishable from the hordes of Elvis imitators.

Finally, a new Mito who looks nothing like the original emerges, and the internet doesn’t notice. How bitterly cynical, but this switcheroo expresses a hard truth: Mito is essentially anonymous. Once her 15 minutes of fame are up, she instantly vanishes into an ocean of pixels.

As Mito, Tamashiro is too strong and individual a presence to be easily obliterated, just as no sequined imitator could truly replace the King on a Las Vegas stage. In the surreal and all-too-real world of “#Mito,” she is the queen, even in exile.