Trapezium has one of the most cunning and manipulative main characters in anime

I went inside Trapeziumthe new anime film from CloverWorks (Spy x Family, Bocchi the Rock!), expecting what the official synopsis promised: a realistic anime about a group of friends with big dreams of becoming idols, and a series of conflicts they must resolve as they struggle with the strict music industry and the dangers of fame.

But this film — the latest anime to hit theaters in the U.S. for a one-time special engagement — isn’t really about four girls and their big dreams. It’s actually a compelling character study of one of the most manipulative, scheming characters I’ve ever seen in anime.

(Editorial note: This post contains major spoilers for Trapezium.)

Based on a light novel by former member of the Japanese idol group Kazumi Takayama, Trapezium follows a high school student named Yu Azuma, who has big dreams of becoming an idol. But she is well aware of her own limitations, so she knows she needs a gimmick to catapult herself to stardom. She decides that she needs to meet and befriend three other beautiful, talented girls, one from each high school in her hometown, so that their group will represent the four cardinal directions.

Yu sets out, first traveling through a wealthy academy in the south, where she encounters the beautiful Ranko Katori and challenges her to a tennis match to win her friendship. She then heads to a vocational training college in the west, specifically seeking out Kurumi Taiga, the only female member of the robotics team, who briefly enjoyed viral fame for being a girl in STEM at a prestigious competition. Kurumi is initially uninterested in meeting her, so Yu feigns interest in robotics, then finds a way to help Kurumi achieve her goals.

When Yu is inadvertently reunited with her old classmate Mika Kamei, Yu is initially reluctant—until she learns that not only is Mika beautiful and a frequent charity worker (a good look for idols, who must maintain an impeccable reputation), but she also happens to attend school in the North, the major Yu is missing. She’s the final piece Yu needs for her master plan.

Yu never lets the other girls know what her big ambitions are, even as she comes up with increasingly specific ways to put them in the spotlight. When they split up at an event where they’re volunteering to help children in wheelchairs get up a scenic mountain trail, Yu throws a minor tantrum. In her mind, the excursion isn’t worth it if they’re not seen together for a potential social media photo. But Yu tells the others that her bad mood is because she wanted to spend time with them, which they happily buy.

That’s not the first indication of the extent of Yu’s manipulation, but it’s certainly the one that really shows how she’ll twist the affections of her friends to achieve her goals. She constantly pushes her friends to go along with her plans, whether they really want to or not. She insists that every new plan is just to have something fun together, as if she hadn’t been strategically planning her rise to stardom for years. She’s unapologetically ruthless, in a way I didn’t expect from a film billed as “four teenage girls with big dreams.”

I expected a little more than Bocchi the Rock!where a similar group of girls with musical ambitions forge healthy bonds as they collectively figure out how to launch their careers. But instead, Trapezium unfolds as a tense psychological thriller, focusing entirely on Yu, the extent of her ambition, and the lengths she will go to achieve her dreams. She treats her so-called friends as necessary tools in her grand scheme, rather than actual people. She is absolutely ruthless when coming up with her plans in her spare time, although to her friends she comes across as someone who is simply passionate (it helps that she twists the truth to get her friends to go along with her plans). She is also a bit of a sore loser, sulking when she gets less attention than the other group members and snapping at her friends when things start to get out of hand.

But at the same time, she’s never outright mean. And she wants to be an idol so badly that it’s hard not to root for her a little bit. She’s a fascinating character, deeply flawed and almost cruel, but her sheer determination is admirable. And while she initially sees the other girls as pieces of a puzzle, it’s clear that she do to care about them — even if she doesn’t realize it herself. Throughout the film, I debated whether I found her admirable, scary, and even a little pathetic. What I did know for sure was that she had me hooked, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her story as it unfolded on screen.

Much about Trapezium‘s story could have gone deeper, especially when it came to really diving into the fallout of idol life, fame, and the group’s eventual reconciliation. But what the film does wonderfully is take a tight, tense look at one girl, the enormity of her ambition, and what happens when a perfect plan starts to unravel.

Crunchyroll premieres Trapezium in U.S. theaters for a special one-day-only screening on September 18. Polygon will update this post once Crunchyroll announces a streaming date for the film.