Over the recent winter break, I had occasion to re-watch one of my favorite Japanese movies, Summer Vacation 1999. Wracked with anxieties about achievement, maturity, and mortality that always seem to descend as one attempts to represent the life one has led during the last year to one’s extended family, I found myself enchanted once more by the movie’s peculiar, self-contained universe founded on carefully suspended temporality and an airless yearning that seems to replace the very air the characters breath within the film’s gauzy, stylized frames.

Hypernaturalistic yet lyrical, beautiful yet brutal, it’s like a Swedish Twilight except the vampire half of the tweenage love story is a girl and possesses a pair of motherfucking balls.