Sarah Bolger

From the studio that brought us classics like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, this animated drama feels unusually low-key and realistic. But while the lack of fantastical elements leaves it somewhat dry, as if it should really be a live-action movie, the animation is still a lavishly detailed feast for the eyes.

It's set in 1963 Japan, where orphaned teen Umi (Bolger) lives with her grandmother (Hendricks) atop a hill overlooking a fishing village. She raises flags every morning as a signal her fisherman father, who died in the Korean War, then heads to school where the topic on everyone's lips is the impending demolition of the ramshackle clubhouse. As the nation prepares for the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, old buildings like this must go, but the students band together to protect it, and Umi teams up with student journalist Shun (Yelchin) to clean up the building and make a plea to the corporate boss (Bridges). Meanwhile, Shun is having a personal crisis: as he begins to fall for Umi, he starts to suspect that they have the same father.

The film never really weaves these two plot strands together, so as Umi and Shun try to save the clubhouse and work out their parentage, each storyline feels like a distraction from the other. But they both raise intriguing questions about the past, present and future in a nation still recovering from WWII. And the beautifully rendered backgrounds bring the period to life with artful detail. On the other hand, the characters are more basic anime shapes, inexpressive and a bit stiff, which makes it difficult to identify with them even when their stories turn extremely emotional.

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There's a terrific sense of menace in this gothic dramatic thriller, which plays on the story's fantasy elements to take us into a teen girl's troubled imagination. It's beautifully shot too, with blood-soaked echoes of Carrie and The Shining in the way the unsettling nastiness is underscored with emotion. Even so, the whole moth motif never really makes much sense, other than as a clumsy metaphor for adolescence.

The events take place in a creepy, isolated girls' school, where 16-year-old Rebecca (Bolger) creates a happy subculture with her best pal Lucy (Gadon) and their party-loving friends. They merrily subvert the rules, keeping the headmistress (Parfitt) on her toes. And the hot new literature teacher Mr Davies (Speedman) gets their pulses racing. Then a new student arrives: Ernessa (Cole) is a loner who reaches out to Lucy for friendship, which upsets Rebecca because she feels like Ernessa is actually preying on her friend. So she sets out to investigate Ernessa's mysterious past, and finds it difficult to tell the difference between reality and her wild imagination.

On the surface, this is a supernatural horror film with ghostly freak-outs, monster-movie grisliness and a rising body count. But is all of this happening in Rebecca's mind? Filmmaker Harron cleverly keeps us off-balance in this sense, letting us see Rebecca's harrowing nightmares and layering her suspicions with the lesbian vampire novel the girls are studying in Mr Davies' class. Stir in hints of teen girl issues like eating disorders, petty jealousies and inappropriate male advances.

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