Misa Amane’s presence lends yet more Japanese flavour to the original.

L’s second guessing and double bluffs of Light’s experimentation are dumbed down to Sherlockian deductions and assumptions, montages breezing through the most exciting plot points, to prioritise weak foot chases and a horribly misjudged romance. One of the most entertaining aspects of the perfectly paced opening episodes is Light’s experimentation with the various rules of the note, yet Wingard elects to disregard them, instead scribing his own rules in order to fumble an original plot of contrivances and contradictions. The ingenious plotting of the original series, handed to Netflix on a silver platter, would have excused the lack of foresight at play here, had it not been completely discarded. Moving the action from Tokyo to Seattle is a predictably dreary Hollywood decision. The inclusion of iconic character Ryuk - here voiced by Willem Dafoe, in so few scenes he is almost not worth mentioning - a Shinigami (or death god) makes the manga typically Japanese, yet Wingard’s film rejects Death Note’s East Asian roots with extreme prejudice and malice of forethought. The original Japanese story becomes a quest for Godlike superiority over a crime-free new world that descends into a frantic and tense cat-and-mouse game between the narcissistic Light and an eccentric detective who goes only by L. A morally complex and sadistic premise that Light finds enthralling.

The inexplicably named Light Turner (né Yagami) stumbles across a notebook that grants its user the power to kill at will. How fortunate it is, therefore, that Death Note has found its home as a Netflix Original, as to pay full price to see this in a cinema would have been a grave misfortune.

As one of maybe five people who quite liked the latest attempt to make “Anime US” a thing, Ghost in the Shell (2017), I was ready to give Adam Wingard’s Death Note a fair shot. Hollywood has been threatening a big screen adaptation of the property for some years now. So present is it, your mates whose only reference point to Japanimation is Spirited Away will have probably heard of it. A series so accessible and watchable it’s frequently cited as an entry point for the medium. Death Note is a ubiquitous and quintessential anime.

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