MUBI

Like a Cronenberg in anime form, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence reimagines, and depicts, in a thorny, complex and overwhelmingly obsessive and distanced way, the thin labels of identity and all the fading, blurring boundaries with it—flesh is whittled to insect or artifice, and the canvas becomes more and more drowned in eerie, insect examination—the New Flesh grows, surrounding the consciousness of vertiginous cities—they are veins, controlled, ruled in technology, artifice, commerce and other sorts of manufactured texture, paired almost like veins, skin, human conscious—it looks wriggling, decaying, unfolding traumas and memory wrapped and encased under film and light. It’s a near-dissection; slow, stark, alienating, elusive and, quite simply, ineffable.