3: Agoraphobia    
The omnibus’ most elegant, stage-managed chapter, Bong Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo” exhibits the delicate precision of an origami figurine. In this allegorical tale on urban loneliness and love, Bong introduces the term hikikomori, or someone who has shunned society. A terrific Teruyuki Kagawa plays the unnamed recluse who hasn’t left his home—and its homogenized patterns—for over a decade. In its confines, he’s overcome the entropy of the city with neurotically neat stacks of read tomes, toilet paper, and take-out pizza boxes. All his necessities are a dial away; when a delivery person does come, he makes a point to avoid eye contact and even touch. These initial scenes of isolation are typical but beautifully composed—cinematographer Jun Fukumoto’s camera drifts through the shut-in’s well-worn space, sumptuously enlarging and lingering on the trivial a few seconds at a time, miring the spectator in the middle-aged man’s droll, rinse-and-repeat life.

Then one fine day, a delivery girl faints during a serendipitous earthquake. It takes this literal groundswell to galvanize the hermit’s long-dormant emotions—he’s struck by that proverbial lightning bolt. This is also the moment of Bong’s chief misfire, in which he decides to emblazon the girl with daft tattoos (buttons reading sadness, hysteria, and coma, which the hikikomori pushes to wake her). To a degree, he redeems the corny motif by treating the hermit’s shocked-and-awed response to physical human contact with the tenderness of a first kiss—a grace he again exhibits when Kagawa decides to free himself from the self-cast cement in order to find this girdled angel on the outside. That’s when Bong magnificently turns the storytelling screw another 180 degrees. Though the closing shot spells bathos rather than the desired pathos, Bong’s surprising, melancholic, unresolved take on Tokyo still catches you wanting to extend your cinematic stay in this brave, new world.