There are no amount of words to describe how beautifully designed, written scored, and executed The Witness is. It's all at once a beautiful segment of anime, a magnificent example of voice-over work, and a beautiful work of art, on every level from sound to audio to REALISM.
As the third episode of the first season of Love Death + Robots, the work settles itself as a centerpiece of the anthology series.
To make a short story long, we begin with a woman witnessing a murder.
She frantically leaves her small apartment within a mega complex suggesting the most nightmarish parts of Hong Kong, and makes her way to what the audience assumes as a gig as a sex worker inside an Eyes Wide Shut-style chateau if it had been shot by Kink.com.
The design of said club is astounding. From the host (voiced by the great Matthew Yang King of Steampunk'd fame), to the interior design mixing fuddy-duddy aesthetics from the dankest corners of Alder Mansion with the cleanest parts of a 1997-era Circuit City.
The murderer she witnessed earlier chases her out of there and into a pale-turquoise complex where, again, there are zero humans anywhere and zero sounds outside of their voices and the constant clanging of nearly machinery, strengthening the intense feelings of isolation and loneliness and desperation to survive.
In the girl’s case, a killer chasing her. In the ghosts of the city, life itself.
The dystopian representation of the world these characters live in is claustrophobic, enormous, and layered. Yet they seem to be the only humans that exist outside of their dwellings. The only life to be seen or experienced is inside of the BDSM chateau and Vladimir room where he is passed out.
The second portion where the heroine is chased out of the club is creepy in a David Lynchian way: zero pedestrians, and zero life in any of the shops they run by. Huge buildings and no occupants. Massive buildings where nobody lives. The apartment she ends up in is barren except for a few hangers in the closet, and a mirror.
Additionally, the stranger who has been chasing her has the key to the apartment she hides in, which I believe would be a major clue about the ending.
That ending, which comes at a frantic pace, feels cathartic because she's murdered who (what we assume to be) her potential killer.
But just as the man had done at the beginning of the film, she also takes a few deep breaths and looks up/around, and finds the mans eyes looking directly at her from across the street in the same floor apartment, and front he look of his face, has the same reaction she did.
But just as the start of the piece began, we're equally confused. Everything makes sense but then it doesn't. and the circle of circumstance continues.
It’s the perfect circle of chaos that the viewer recognized from the very first frame.