Vertigo

Kon's film is a Hitchcock construction in animation, and Vertigo is the specific one: a woman remade into an image somebody else needs her to be, and a watcher who cannot tell the woman from the image. The shared machinery is the double. Mima is haunted by the pop idol she stopped being, who appears to her as a separate person; Scottie rebuilds Judy into Madeleine and the film refuses to say which is real. Both end by making the audience complicit in preferring the constructed version. Filed MEDIUM: Kon named Hitchcock and De Palma as reference points for the thriller grammar without singling out this film.

Park Chan-wook's film shares Vertigo's structure: a detective becomes obsessed with the woman he is watching, a death from a height turns the story, and the second half returns to the same pair with the obsession unresolved. MEDIUM, recorded on those structural parallels, which are the usual point of comparison between the two films.

Martin Scorsese has said he screened film noir and Hitchcock for the cast and crew, Vertigo among them, and the film's treatment of a detective undone by grief and by an obsession with a dead woman is Vertigo's. Filed LOW: the story comes from Dennis Lehane's novel, and the Hitchcock debt is in the telling.