he last thing 17-year-old Kyosuke Date remembers is his mother, bleeding to death on the floor of her own church, telling him not to go get help—and then stabbing him in the heart. Then he wakes up,
bandaged and disoriented, in the room of a young woman who flashes her panties at him and tells him she dug him up in a graveyard because she had a premonition that he was alive inside his coffin. When he begins to get upset, she tells him she's a nurse and then sedates him into unconsciousness. After a week has passed and his wound has completely healed, he visits the graveyard where the woman, Maya Misaki, apparently found him. There he's attacked by an insane, screeching, vaguely human doctor who's supposedly looking for Kyosuke's sister—whom Kyosuke doesn't remember.
Before the doctor can do something particularly nasty to Kyosuke with a double handful of scalpels, a third man intervenes. The doctor enigmatically identifies him as Shiro Mibu; Shiro enigmatically
identifies the doctor as coming from The Hospital. Later, Shiro somehow gains access to Maya's video diary, in which she mournfully complains that she's only a fragment of a person and that she thought someone would eventually come along to free her from her dull life and make her into the whole person she was meant to be. She has decided, apparently, that Kyosuke is that person, and she firmly informs the camera that she's never letting him go.
But Maya has already been captured by a mysterious shadow organization called the Kirihara Group. As she herself deduced, she's not a whole person, she's a "Flicker," one of many cast-off fragments of
the soul of Kyosuke's twin sister, Runa. Because the Kiriharas want Runa, they're collecting and dissecting Flickers. But Kyosuke has a limited telepathic link with Maya, thanks to his connection with Runa, and he and Shiro invade a Kirihara installation to get Maya back. In the process, Kyosuke is shot, seemingly fatally. To his surprise, he recovers from the wound and transforms into the SoulTaker, a demonic-looking, mecha-like creature. Oddly enough, no one else seems particularly surprised; they merely note that he's "another mutant."
A puzzle that's nowhere near complete
By the end of the three episodes on this opening DVD, a lot of questions about all this have been raised, but few have been answered; SoulTaker's creators have clearly made a concerted effort to be as cryptic as possible. In the opening episode, particularly, images flicker by in rapid succession as the "camera" quickly shifts perspective, picking out small details (eyes, feet, a crucifix) or taking in settings from a distancing remove. Due to swift pacing, jumps back and forth in time, deliberate gaps in continuity, visual non sequiturs, blurring and special effects, perplexing scenes that can't be interpreted until later events add some background, images of things that can't be identified until something moves, and, above all, the very strange events and the many, many things that aren't explained at all, it's virtually impossible to follow these episodes the first time
through.
Naturally, with this many barriers to comprehension, SoulTaker's creative team has had to come up with reasons for people to keep watching. Some of the bait they use is fairly standard—sex (in the person of Maya, who initially appears in incongruously revealing clothes and provocative poses) and violence (as Kyosuke and Shiro engage the doctor, the Kiriharas' android security forces and a
giant robot in flashy, intense combat). But as baffling as SoulTaker's oblique visual style can be, it's also a draw. It's often hard to make the scattered, individual shots cohere into a sensible story, but those individual shots are sharp, gorgeous and unconventionally designed. From Kyosuke and Maya's second conversation, held in part against a backdrop of bright, moving, abstract geometric
shapes, to Kyosuke's shattered memories, which contain a great deal of colorful iconography and attention-grabbing tableaux, SoulTaker makes sure every fragmented shot is a memorable one.
And, of course, there's the mystery itself. As stylized, mysterious puzzle-stories like Serial Experiments Lain, Gasaraki, and Boogiepop
Phantom become increasingly popular in the United States, fans will have to decide for themselves whether complex mystery stories like this one are rewarding to unravel or just frustrating. SoulTaker, with its intriguing ideas about human soul-fragments, is a decent argument for the former. But either way, its visual poetry and zippy pace demand attention and make it impossible to become bored.
SoulTaker is supposed to come with a "collectible," "limited-edition" mini-encyclopedia series guide. Unfortunately, the review copy didn't include one, which makes it difficult to judge its
potential impact on confused new viewers. Pioneer's SoulTaker site does provide a little background
and perspective on some of the major players, though, which makes it a bit easier to decode these opening episodes.
— Tasha
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