In Netflix show High-Rise Invasion, a schoolgirl vigilante battles an army of smiley-faced psycho killers

There can be few handier means of evading the violence-in-creative-endeavours police than dreaming up a Japanese anime series. Take any flavour of depraved killer you like – katana wielder; callous, cigarette-puffing sniper; axe-inspired slayer; base­ball player pitching high-speed cannonballs; psycho sledgehammer boy – and use them to populate the nightmare narrative of a schoolgirl who turns vigilante to rub out zombie-like villains. Translation: create High-Rise Invasion (Netflix).

Stuck in some kind of waking dream, Yuri Honjo enters the fray trapped atop a skyscraper while trying to evade the flashing blade of a bloodstained caveman in a creepy “smiley-face” mask. And he’s just the first in a series of psycho killers in identical facial disguise.

All are subject to mind control exercised by some unseen power ordering them to murder the maskless, or drive them to despair so they chuck themselves off the tops of tall buildings. With their ground floors out of bounds, the high-rises are linked by jungle-style rope bridges.

Yuri – suddenly an expert with an gun – becomes an avenger, wiping out smiley-faced monsters while searching for her lost brother and telling a potentially treacherous fellow female target of the psycho brigade: “You’re a killer, but you don’t seem like a bad person.” Well, it takes all sorts, I suppose.

What might we discern amid the mayhem of this 12-part first series, with its elevated blood-and-gore squelch factor? Modern life, it appears, can make brutes of us, blotting out all self-awareness and giving us a grievous case of misanthropy. Alienation and victimisation don’t help much either.

And treading carefully when crossing rope bridges is advisable.