The film opens with the sound of slowly approaching footsteps, and a dark and blurry low-angle shot of a shuffling figure in bandages looking down upon Elena Takahashi (Lisa Siera) as she lies terrified on the floor of a school corridor where she appears to be choking. Next we see Elena in a hospital bed, though she is evidently there not owing to assault from a mummy – even if her first visitor is her actual mother Kayako (Mayu Ozawa) – but rather because of what sounds like self-harm and an eating disorder. It is hard to be sure what the relative chronology between these two scenes is, but what bridges them is Elena’s supine posture in both, and the headphones that she wears in her ears. Still, whether that hallway monster was a metaphor for what has put Elena into the hospital’s care, or a forward glimpse at what she must face in the film’s climax, one thing is clear: those bandages that it wears are a signifier of an identity both hidden and damaged, and in this respect, the creature is just like Elena.

Indeed Elena is in conflict with herself. This is in part down to the usual growing pains of a teenager, having to negotiate the crooked path from childhood to adulthood with only her raging hormones as a guide; but for Elena in particular, it is also because she is caught between divorced parents and two cultures (her father is British), ensuring that she will always be tarred with the gaijin slur and never feel fully at home in Japan, or indeed in her own skin. Elena is a headily toxic stew of adolescent angst and alienation, with one half of her never sure what the other is doing.

After being bullied in her old school, which is how she ended up in hospital, Elena has been moved by the concerned, bewildered Kayako into a new one, where she will quickly – to her surprise – find a warm welcome and friendship from classmate Akari (Miyu Okuno), even if, in always anticipating and expecting the worst from others, Elena can be her own worst enemy. There are bullies in this classroom too, although fortunately for Elena they reserve most of their cruelty for Nyan Ito (Runa Hirasawa) instead. As an odd, friendless, paranoid loner, Nyan is an easy target. Like Elena, she is always glued to her headphones to insulate herself from the threatening world beyond, but unlike Elena, she is resistant to removing them even during lessons. After Nyan had an episode in class which ends in a fatal “accident”, Elena comes to believe that Nyan has passed on a curse to her, and the half-British half-Japanese girl is soon behaving in a similarly disturbed manner. All the warning signs are there for the unfolding of another teen tragedy.

Although it is entirely possible to read The Invisible Half as a psychodrama of a conflicted young woman’s mental collapse under the pressures of adolescence, Elena’s experiences are presented in the idioms of horror. For once the broken glass on Nyan’s phone has drawn blood from two of Elena’s fingers, this self-appointed outsider finds herself being slowly, if inexorably, pursued by a bandaged figure that she can only hear through her headphones, and only see if holding her phone (the source of much of the abuse she has suffered from fellow pupils). What ensues is a mad dash, with help from Akari, to escape the ever-advancing monster and to discover its origins, all leading to an irrational, oneiric confrontation in the school corridors at night, with the battery of Elena’s phone, like her very life, running on empty.

In other words, The Invisible Half remixes elements from Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call (2003), David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014), Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man (2020) and the Whispering Corridors series to track Elena’s deep-seated sense of estrangement, discomfort and self-loathing – all feelings that are familiar to many a teenager. In the end the bandages might be on her (and Akari), but now that Elena has faced her inner demon and seen who she herself truly is, she is well on the path to recovery, healing and self-acceptance – which is to say, growing up.

The world premiere of The Invisible Half takes place during the 33rd edition of Raindance, which takes place between June 18th and 27th.