Night City and Night Markets: Here’s why ‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ and ‘Left-Handed Girl’ should be on your watchlist

Whether you’re an old hand at arthouse or just dipping a toe into the rising otaku subculture of anime aficionados around the world, this column lists curated titles that challenge, comfort, and occasionally combust your expectations.

What happens, when the chrome of the future is narrated beside a neon-streaked present? Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Left-Handed Girl (both streaming on Netflix) answer that question in distinct keys. The former one is Studio Trigger’s award-winning anime that translates a sprawling video game world into a human-sized tragedy, while the latter is Shih-Ching Tsou’s Taipei drama that turns market stalls and a child’s left hand into a political fable. Both projects are collaborations that carry other people’s reputations, yet each has its own emotional grammar.

From the drawing board

Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a furious, uncouth spectacle shaped into intimacy. Studio Trigger and game developers CD Projekt Red take the tactile clutter of Cyberpunk 2077’s lingo, augments, radio-station detritus and depressing dystopia, and compress it into 10 episodes that make a single life feel gigantic. 

The show’s achievement is how it gives its protagonist, David Martinez, a believable arc from student to street mercenary, and it insists that Night City is a social machine whose failures are structural rather than circumstantial. The series wears its sex and gore plainly, but those shocks act as punctuation for a subtler argument about debt, aspiration, and the compulsion to upgrade oneself into unlivable proportions.

Studio Trigger’s direction spells velocity with frames that bend for maximum comic-book rupture, and character designs that translate game aesthetics into expressive bodies. Music and sound are also essential to the series’ infrastructure. The result can feel like Kill la Kill colliding with the grungier corners of Cowboy Bebop, both being Japanese anime series, while borrowing some of Japanese anime film Redline’s velocity. 

A still from Cyberpunk: Edgerunners
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

If you like Ghost in the Shell for its civic paranoia and kinetic tableaux, or Blade Runner for its doomed romance and philosophical circuitry, you’ll probably find a tragic through line in the way Edgerunners turns futurism into bedside grief. And if you enjoyed how Into the Spider-Verse folded a familiar city into visual distortion, you’ll also find similar pleasures of overstimulation over here.

Foreign affairs

Left-Handed Girl shrinks the frame and thickens the politics. Shih-Ching Tsou’s debut feature, co-written with Sean Baker, follows a working-class household in Taipei, Taiwan, where a grandfather’s superstitious dismissal of a little girl’s left hand blooms into a mechanism of control. The film has already begun to travel the festival circuit and markets, and it serves as Taiwan’s submission for Best International Feature this year, which positions it as a national claim-statement about who gets to narrate Taiwanese life now.

Shot on iPhones and edited with a Bakerian appetite for immediacy, the film is at once tender and exasperated. Its camera height frequently matches its brilliant nine-year-old star Nina Ye’s late-night runs through the market, forcing us to read the city in slivers, puddles of neon and the choreography of scooters. Actor’s faces are often framed compact encyclopaedias of feeling, while Tsou stages the city as something that devours and sometimes returns scraps. The left hand itself, becomes a dramaturgical engine that exposes how shame, patriarchy, and economic precarity are taught and inherited.

A still from Left-Handed Girl
| Photo Credit:
Netflix

The family’s dogged return to Taipei has the emotional freight of Nomadland, though filtered through the pressures of Taiwanese social obligations. The film also echoes Minari and Shoplifters in the way it traces families improvising dignity under pressure, finding small pockets of grace inside systems that keep shrinking their choices. A climactic family banquet blowout even has the messy, spiralling energy of the dinner sequence in Yi Yi, where decades of resentment break the surface all at once. And it goes without saying that if you’re a fan of Sean Baker’s street-level details of commerce and precarity, you’ll probably enjoy Left-Handed Girl for the way it explores how small humiliations accumulate. 

Ctrl+Alt+Cinema is a fortnightly column that brings you handpicked gems from the boundless offerings of world cinema and anime.