MOVIE REVIEW

■THANA BOONLERT

- THANA BOONLERT

A rural village in Kubitachi, Japan, is humming with the sound of summer.

Cicadas sing in deafening chorus. Sweat drips in the sweltering heat. Against this backdrop, two young lads savour melting ice cream on carefree days.

Passing time in random conversation, Yoshiki asks Hikaru, who went missing on a mountain and came back six months ago but cannot recall anything, in a deadpan manner: "You're not Hikaru, are you?"

"How did you... I thought I copied him perfectly," comes the reply.

Suddenly, an eerie slime melts from its left eye, pleading Yoshiki not to give away its secret.

"This body and personality ain't mine, but I like you a whole lot," it says.

Despite the shock of revelation, Yoshiki accepts such replacement easily. As fantasy seeps into the mundane reality of the idyllic countryside, their relationship grows closer, with sexual overtones that keep fans on the edge of their seats.

Based on the coming-of-age horror comic, Netflix's The Summer Hikaru Died expands the universe of Boys' Love (BL) in a more than human way. It is none other than the eldritch impersonator - a new queer posthuman figure — that opens up possibilities for envisioning intimacy between human and nonhuman entities, or broadly speaking, human and otherness that disrupts the heterosexual norm.

Injured in an accident on the mountain, Hikaru thinks of Yoshiki on his death's throes — “I don’t want him to be alone. I need somebody to stay by his side.”