Serial Experiments Lain: The Complete Collection

This classic 1998 anime series from director Ryutaro Nakamura offers a bold mix of reality, paranoia, cyberpunk culture, religion, and adventure. Lain Iwakura is an adolescent suburban girl whose life is jolted when her schoolmates begin to receive e-mails from a student who committed suicide. Lain herself gets a message from the supposedly dead Chisa, who insists that she has not passed away, but merely “abandoned the flesh” and now resides in the Wired, a sort of Internet-on-steroids system that links all communication channels (including machine-generated text and human thoughts). Even more eerie is Chisa's insistence that God exists in the Wired, which leads Lain to investigate, drawing her into conflicts that blur reality and hallucinations. This brilliantly constructed series offers thoroughly unpredictable and profound twists, deeply satisfying characters, and distinctive animation. Compiling all 13 episodes on a dual-language set, rated TV-14, extras include an accompanying art book. Highly recommended. (P. Hall)