What can I say to introduce <harmony/> that I haven’t said about a show in the past? I waxed long about dystopian fiction and the reactionary fear of the science fiction genre introducing Love and Lies, and while I could reword my lengthy digression, that would seem a little cheap.
For those who don’t want to follow the link and read the whole long thing, I’ll give the super-basic summary: dystopian fiction is pretty common, and arguably for good reason because conflict makes good stories and thus utopias aren’t much fun. But it’s still, philosophically, a frustration with lots of entries in the Science Fiction genre. <harmony/> is arguably another.
I say arguably because while it does have elements of the “here’s a nice thing, fear and hate it” approach, I don’t think that’s where the focus was. The film takes place in a future where the World Health Organization has risen to the status of preeminent world power, peddling a system that regulates life and eliminates disease and aging, potentially stripping people of important freedoms in the process. But as much as that seems like the makings for another game of Misspent Youth in cinematic form, the angle we’re going to approach that world from is… a little different.
After an eerie opening in a white space where lines of code play over a monolith, we find ourselves with a main-character-esque redhead at a field of sunflowers on the edge of the desert
We find out pretty quickly that she’s a somewhat crooked representative of some sort of controlling globalist force, here in war-torn Africa to oversee some kind of ceasefire and more personally and immediately to make backroom deals that trade ultratech medicine for the likes of cigarettes and booze. Just before there’s a tangle with a local government drone, we also get our most succinct opening statement of what you’d think would be movie’s ethos when our lead’s trading partner calls her out (or her bosses or her “god”) as lacking moderation in how they force their ideals on others ignoring the strife that such behavior causes. Is that really the point? We’ll get to it.
We also learn that our lead considers herself a coward, evidently for not committing suicide with a friend, years ago. We get some heavy talks from our lead, Tuan, about how her society is killing humanity with kindness and how her old friend, Miach, went out as a sort of protest against this and invited Tuan to do the same.
Thus, we launch into more of a flashback, meeting Miach properly and hearing her displeasure with WatchMe, which seems to be a sort of nanomedicine system that, at least in the dystopian Japan of this world, is applied at birth and activates over time, perfectly regulating bodily functions – or, as Miach puts it “taking away freedom to get fat or freedom to die.”. Obviously, Tuan didn’t go through with it (or at least failed), and made her way to the hellhole battlefields of the world to escape the suffocating society she grew up in.
This makes things rather awkward for her when her boss, not amused by the backroom deals, sends her home to think about what she’s done. She instead thinks of a lot more flashbacks to Miach and the other member and survivor of their attempted protest suicide, Cian. Though Tuan seems to still look up to Miach, she comes off as… kind of creepy? Okay, I get the ultra-controlled society is meant to be bad in its own way, but when this girl calmly talks about hacking the system to kill literally everybody, and the audience is given a lot of reason to look on her like more of a cult leader, you start to suspect you’re in the kind of picture where there is no “right” side.
Tuan returns to the overwhelmingly white-and-pink and disturbingly organic Japan and chats with Cian – seemingly now a model citizen – about mostly nothing, and then about old times. At which point Cian, in the middle of a light lunch, stabs herself through the throat with the knife from her place setting
This ends up being part of a mass suicide incident involving over six thousand attempts, nearly half of which were successful. Say, weren’t we just talking about a crazy death-cult leader who was presumed dead through a dubious means of suicide? And who in the conversation immediately before, it’s mentioned her body was not disposed of normally but was instead “donated” or something? In a two hour movie that needs to have some degree of continuity of themes and character no less…
But enough of that, the mass suicide finally serves as our main plot hook. Since everyone who attempted and failed has been rendered comatose through some unknown mechanism, it’s not like they can just question thousands of “witnesses”, so it’s up to Tuan’s job rank to conduct a global investigation into this incident. Tuan blackmails her boss to not be forcibly recused from the case, and thus has a fixed timer to do her investigating.
Clearly suspecting at least a link to what savvy viewers are likely to have figured, Tuan checks in with Miach’s family, learning both that she was an adopted war orphan and that her body was “donated” to the very scientist whose work produced WatchMe – who Tuan’s father worked for before disappearing just after their attempted suicide. We also get a little bit of setting detail that this medical and surveillance dystopia emerged from a previous nuclear war apocalypse.
Tuan isn’t stupid and checks in with said scientist already expecting that both he and her dad may have been involved, learning that dad took the body of Miach to Baghdad, and that he was researching some kind of Skinner box mind control. She’s almost immediately picked up by an Interpol agent (which is a different organization that hers, which is technically a branch of the WHO) who seems to be on at least a related case involving mind control, specifically theorizing that the victims of the mass suicide were controlled to do it.
This is when the terrorists send a message: they want everyone in the world to kill somebody else, with a deadline of one week or else induced suicide. To prove it, they cause the newscaster to suicide. Because of the wording of the message, Tuan immediately fingers it as being Miach’s words. And sure enough, doing digital detective work on the plane to Baghdad, she finds that Miach gave Cian a ring just before she was caused to commit suicide – including the kill signal.
In Baghdad, a series of notes lead Tuan to encounter her deadbeat dad. She finds out from him that after her suicide (failed), Miach was a test subject in his corrupt WHO subgroup’s attempt to perfect a form of mind control known as the Harmony Program – a successful mind control that obliterates conscious will and that the WHO secretly has installed in everybody in case they need to push the big red button to avoid chaos. Miach was under its effects, but was freed from them at the experiment’s end, and now seems to be trying to push humanity to the brink explicitly so that everyone can be dragged into such a state.
Just as dad is ready to send Tuan on to face Miach and hopefully stop her, the Interpol agent reappears and pulls a backstab, being part of Miach’s group against the dad’s, leading to a chase and shootout that ends with dad taking the last bullet for Tuan as she shoots the agent. Tuan gets from the dying agent that Miach is in her homeland of Chechnya, leaving us half an hour to confront the true mastermind.
This starts with hearing from Tuan’s boss… and her bosses, who together make up the rest of Dad’s faction of notables who don’t want to brainwash all humanity if they can avoid it. They pretty much confirm that Tuan is the only one who can fix this.
We also get a flashback to some important talking with dad about Miach and technobabble about why she is… the way she is. The specifics aren’t important, but Tuan goes to the final showdown knowing that Miach, on a fundamental level, never thought like other human beings.
In the confrontation, taking place in the ruins of what was once a Russian army camp where Miach was abused, she and Tuan have that final showdown. Mostly, Miach acts creepily merry while Tuan has to struggle to retain any sort of resolve in the face of the horrors Miach went through… even hearing of those she intends to cause.
This ends as Tuan confesses her love for Miach… and kills her, so that she’ll stay unchanged the Miach that Tuan loved. Thus, with Tuan not reporting in, the button is pushed and the Harmony program runs, overwhelming most of the Earth’s population and rendering them beings that act, even intelligently, but do not think. Our final shots are of nature imagery as classical music plays, followed by a return to the eerie white space with code, which we now understand to be a representation of the sterility of post-Harmony humanity. There’s a lot unresolved in the world, like if the elders had a plan for their emergency protocol beyond redefining what it means to be human or what would happen with the frankly substantial populations of non-regulated people we’ve seen in this show but… that’s it. Our main character’s journey is over. No thoughts, no “soul”, never again we suppose.
<harmony/> is… a bit of a hard one. A basic skeleton of the happenings until the last moment would lead you to believe that this was a thriller, maybe even with action components – cognate to the 2002 western film Equilibrium. Despite sharing a lot of major themes, <harmony/> is instead written as an emotional drama, at times almost feeling like a really twisted slice of life. More than the world (despite the ambiguous destruction/transformation of the same), the system, or anything else this is about the relationship between Tuan and Miach, and Tuan’s continued obsession thirteen years after Miach’s apparent death. Though you can guess there was romance between the two (or something like it, given what Miach is like) pretty early on given how they interact even in the first flashbacks, the film tries to keep it ambiguous until the final act, in part because we don’t necessarily know what is rather than what was.
Because of this, we have to analyze this more as something intended to be a tragedy than a thriller, despite how much thriller material is incidentally or perhaps deliberately misleading the audience. To that end, viewing it as a tragedy that’s generally going to feature a fatally flawed lead rather than an imitable one, I’m not sure we’re supposed to empathize with Tuan’s choice to go with Miach’s plan and not stop the oncoming esoteric doom (at least for anybody other than Miach). I don’t want to really get into the philosophy in this work, because that is and always has been a poor axis to criticize a work on. This is something I waxed long about in my review of Earth Maiden Arjuna and while I couldn’t let that one get away without a bonus round, I think <harmony/>, if it can even be said to have a stand, can be excused as at least being artful in the presentation. Whatever you feel, or were meant to feel, you understand why Miach desired this ending, why others would fight against it, where and why the WHO authority is contentious, and so on.
I want to come back to that moment in the opening, where the Luddite tribe Tuan was trading with calls out the WHO’s meddlesome behavior. It touches on a lot of the themes the movie does: control, forced safety, free will, and conflict. But ultimately what feels like an overture for the piece when it is delivered is instead… just another perspective on a screwed-up world.
That is, with the exception of Tuan. She might be our main character and we might get a ton of flashbacks to her teenage years, but by the end of this… I don’t actually know how Miach entranced her so utterly. Were we supposed to believe that Tuan was just weak, and easily taken in by Miach’s cultish charisma? That the bonds of love and teenage angst were unchanged by over a decade living and working in the spicy regions of Earth far away from the Japan they both hated? Has Tuan been obsessive in thinking of Miach this whole time, or do old memories mostly resurface in response to events like being forced to return to Japan or the whole main plot that happens after?
This sounds like a big deal, but it’s actually a small blemish all things considered. I don’t know Tuan as well as I would like for the ending that the movie goes for, and that’s kind of important seeing as she’s the main character and the ending is a big deal in both objective stakes (the world) and the stakes that have been built over the show (it’s what everyone cares about), but we’re only a little short of the mark.
On most of the other potential issues, I’m of two minds. The flashbacks come hot and heavy and get rather heavy handed, but they’re needed to establish the emotional tragedy. But at the same time while the film is running they feel like they distract from the plot that’s ongoing. I think the biggest issue isn’t the quantity, high though it is, but how out of order and disjointed the flashbacks are, not letting the audience form a clear picture of what Tuan went through. At least, not on a scale equivalent to how much movie the flashbacks eat.
So, in the end, what’s the damage? How do we rate this love story of an apocalyptic cult leader and the former follower who can’t quit her, wrapped as it is in a thriller’s shell?
For me… B-. Visually interesting and functionally put together though it is, <harmony/> drags in places and asks questions that, in the format it delivers them, can’t really be properly chewed on. This is one that could have knocked out of the park as a mid-century novel. Especially with the ending, if this were in text and both you and the work had all the time in the world to really dig into the question of what it means to have consciousness or will? It could, written to the max, stand alongside the dystopian greats. But as an animated film, it tries. It tries, but it still doesn’t put its best foot forward; the medium that it’s in simply doesn’t allow the space the ideas need. Which, when the thriller aspects are pretty much discarded on a conceptual level, leaves tragic romance holding much more weight than it actually can.
I usually finish out, after dropping a letter grade, by saying if I do or don’t recommend a thing, often with some color as to who I would make that recommendation or what mood you ought to be in, but here… I’m going to just recommend Equilibrium, as I cited earlier. At least there you’ll get some glorious action cheese. <harmony/> itself… sure, fine. I don’t have anything against it and it’s probably underwatched and under-regarded, but at the same time I see why this one didn’t really seem to take off.