i watched serial experiments lain - a short review

I'm 26 years late to the party but I just finished watching Serial Experiments Lain and I absolutely loved it. I was so entranced by this series that I watched its 13 episodes over the period of just two evenings.

Lain is surreal. It is mysterious, bizarre and disorienting. First and foremost it is strongly permeated by themes of identity, human connection, communication and how all of these are affected by increasingly powerful technology.

Lain is also the name of the protagonist, an introverted junior high school student with little to no friends and an emotionally distant family. The story kicks into motion when Lain and many other of her classmates get mail from Yomoda Chisa, a student who committed suicide the week before. In the mail Chisa tells Lain that she isn't dead but that she merely abandoned her physical self to live in the virtual world of the Wired.

The Wired is a technology in the world of Lain that at first glance resembles our internet but seems to differ quite drastically in various ways that make it seem more like a parallel universe that, depending on skill and equipment, can be more or less fully entered by the user. This ranges from looking at emails on a phone screen to actually walking in cyberspace, similar to but more powerful than today's VR. Lain who previously had little interest in and knowledge of the Wired becomes curious and asks her father if he can get her a more powerful Navi - a type of device needed to access the Wired, akin to a PC. What follows are 12 and a half episodes of psychedelic transhumanist, sci-fi cyberpunk in a way that I have never seen before.

Thematically, Lain still feels as, if not even more relevant than when it first aired in July 1998. It shows the allure and dangers of a parallel world to escape to when life isn't going your way and it shows a society of people increasingly alienated from each other. Most social interactions in Lain feel either completely absurd and unnatural or like horror. You quickly get the sense that human interaction doesn't seem to make sense anymore.

This is supported by the character designs by Yoshitoshi Abe, the animation by Triangle Staff and the environmental art, all of which can switch between being surreally beautiful, grotesque or ugly in the blink of an eye.

I don't remember when I first heard of Serial Experiments Lain but the series recently came to my attention from a hazel video about Lain on the Playstation. It didn't take long for me to know that I was gonna like this. I'm sure that had I watched this around the age of 14 as an introverted, socially isolated computer nerd, it probably would've become my whole identity for a long time. But even at 33 Lain feels meaningful and impacting. I will probably rewatch this many times in the future and I will definitely check out the Playstation game.