Mitsuko was on the bus with a bunch of other girls from her private school when her world was turned upside down. Suddenly a gust of wind sheered off the upper half of the bus and the top halves of everyone in it. She only just survived because she had knelt down to pick up her pen. Things only get weirder from there, with some serious body-swapping and quite a lot of gore in between.
Tag (Riaru Onigokko) provides examples of the following tropes:
- Artistic License – Biology: the amount of blood that comes spurting out of the various corpses, and the force it comes out with, is way more than anything possible in the normal world. Justified considering that this movie is a surreal horror flick.
- It could also be because the movie takes place in the world of a video game, which are often known for having excessive blood splatter and unrealistically gruesome deaths in order to be more visually entertaining for a player.
- Body Surf: Mitsuko changes bodies three times over the course of the movie.
- Crazy Jealous Guy: Mitsuko's tormentor ends up being a guy she rejected in the past who she doesn't even remember, and who stole her DNA and built an entire video game around killing her and her friends in brutal ways before trying to get his "prize" in the form of sex.
- Downer Beginning: The film starts with Mitsuko's entire bus getting bisected, along with random passersby she encounters.
- Dramatic Wind: Mitsuko encounters it numerous times during the bus and school sequences, when it becomes deadly enough to bisect anyone in its path. It settles down midway through the school level, only to kill her classmates again at the end.
- Driven to Suicide: Mitsuko and her other selves all kill themselves to escape Lord's control.
- Fanservice: Averted. All the wedding guests start stripping at Mitsuko/Keiko's wedding, but it's not quite sexy as they all start antagonizing her — symbolism that she, a closeted lesbian, is taunted by women she can't have.
- Foreshadowing: While playing hooky, the girls notice a thin mattress and pillows in the woods, and wonder how it got there, foreshadowing the ending, where Lord shows Mitsuko a mattress and pillows in a bid to have sex with her.
- Gainax Ending: Mitsuko, realizing she's the main character in the video game and the only one with any agency, changes her destiny by killing herself in all the levels before any violence can begin. This seems to end the game, and another version of Mitsuko wakes up in the snow, declares that "it's over" and runs off.
- Gorn: The film begins with two buses full of teenagers getting horizontally sliced in half, and it all goes downhill from there.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The film opens with Mitsuko's entire class getting graphically bisected by a mysterious wind. One level also ends with Mitsuko forced to rip Aki in half by pulling wires out of her.
- Hope Spot: The opening sequence seems to be nothing but a dream, and Mitsuko enjoys a carefree session of hooky with her friends... Until that world becomes violent, too.
- Identity Amnesia: When Mitsuko stumbles on a school she's apparently never been to, all the other characters just believe she's forgotten who she is. The real answer is more complicated.
- Imagine Spot: To explain her theories on alternate universes, Sur imagines Taeko getting eaten alive by an alligator after the former throws a rock into the pond.
- Improbably Female Cast: Every character Mitsuko sees is female subverted at the end when she walks into a place entirely populated by men
- Mind Screw: Even taking into consideration the metaphor of the movie (sexism in the Japanese entertainment industry, oppression and expectations faced by young women going through adolescence and adulthood, life as a closeted lesbian), it's still screwy. Expect a lot of questions as the credits roll.
- The Reveal: The real Mitsuko died over a century ago, and the current version of herself is just a video game character moving between dimensions, or "worlds," at the behest of an old man who had a crush on her in his youth and was rejected.
- Transparent Closet: Mitsuko's frequently teased for her relationship with Aki, and her character in general seems to be a closeted lesbian.
- What Measure Is a Mook?: Invoked. In one scene, Mitsuko is attacked by a NPC furious that Mitsuko's survival comes in hand with the deaths of the rest of the characters.
- Women Are Wiser: The scenes populated only by schoolgirls are peaceful, bright and full of solidarity, until the violence begins, a metaphor for how male presence in the lives of the young women has negative consequences. Shown most blatantly at Mitsuko/Keiko's wedding, where the bridegroom at the altar is a pig-man in a coffin, and the Man's World is a dark, boorish, filthy place.
- World Gone Mad: the world that Mitsuko winds up in fits this trope surprisingly well.
- You ALL Look Familiar: Deliberately invoked. Mitsuko starts seeing the same girls from world to world, such as from the school to her wedding to the race bystanders. Turns out they're actually just NPCs in the video game Mitsuko is involved in.
