The Flower of Midsummer Night by Nobu Takahashi [Video]

“It’s just an illusion to have emotional connections with others”.

Director Hiroki Wakamatsu – who studied pedagogy and psychology at Tokyo Metropolitan University before veering towards filmmaking – presents a 71-minute film where he sets to explore human and not-human psychological interactions in the microcosm of an emotionally distressed young man’s mind.

Makoto (Ryutaro Akimoto) is voluntarily acting as a Guinea pig in an experiment carried forward by an Artificial Intelligence developer team. They are working on the creation of a transhumanoid device called AGEHA (Nori Sato), consisting of a human female body, fitted with an artificial intelligence system designed to help people manage and improve their emotional well-being. During Makoto and AGEHA sessions, the young man is wired to the cyborg and an emotional connection and synchronicity are established.

However, things start to get out of control when Makoto plunges deeper into his personal past, re-enacting traumatic episodes of his …