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.