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Chainsaw Man: Reze Arc Movie Review (spoilers)
The Reze arc movie hit me like I knew the car was coming and still stepped into the road anyway.
I’ve read this arc. I know every beat. I know exactly when the knife twists. And somehow watching it animated made it feel like I was experiencing it for the first time and also like I was being punished for ever hoping Denji could be happy.
The thing that blew me away wasn’t just the “MAPPA cooked” stuff (even though they absolutely did). The action is ridiculous: the choreography feels like it’s being storyboarded by someone in the middle of a manic episode, the colors are screaming, the effects are so extra it circles back around to feeling inevitable. Every fight feels like a natural disaster trying to cosplay as sakuga.
But the brutality of this movie isn’t in the violence. It’s in how normal the romance feels.
Denji and Reze are awkward and sweet in a way that’s so painfully mundane. The late-night pool. The rain. The café. That stupid little bubble of “maybe this time it’s real” that sits in your chest like a soap bubble and you pretend you don’t see how thin it is. He’s not suddenly smarter, or more emotionally literate; he’s just a lonely, abused kid being offered affection for the first time that isn’t transactional or weaponized. And because it’s Chainsaw Man, obviously it’s both of those things, but he doesn’t know that yet.
The beach scene is the one that actually wrecked me. Not the explosions, not the crazy devil forms, not the bodies in silly poses. Just Denji begging: “I don’t care if you say you hate me… I’ll be waiting.”
That’s the moment where the story stops being edgy and just becomes mean. Because that’s not shounen-hero bravado. That’s “I have been abandoned enough times that I will accept literally any terms just to not be left again.”
And then, of course, he is.
It’s worse animated because you can’t escape into the pacing of reading. The movie traps you in it: the voice acting, the hesitation, the way his body language collapses in on itself. There’s no panel border to hide behind, it just sits there and forces you to watch a kid relive your worst relationships in 5.1 surround sound.
One thing that honestly makes me feral is how many people still act surprised that Makima is a Devil. Her eyes are almost identical to Power’s. Yellow with that red ringed iris. At this point, if you’re shocked, you’re basically roleplaying one of those background civilians in the series who just assumes “gee, that woman with terrifying energy and weird eyes is probably just a very dedicated civil servant!” She walks through the movie like a genre error — the romance, the slice-of-life, the spy thriller… and then her, like the system itself, quietly rewiring everything in the background.
If I have a complaint, it’s Aki and Angel Devil. Angel is one of my favorite minor characters and in this movie they feel like someone taped together a “best-of” reel and spliced it in between Reze scenes. The skeleton is there — Aki’s exhaustion, his panic about watching more people die, the little flashes of tenderness and horror around Angel — but there’s no time to let it rot properly. His outburst about not wanting to see more people die in front of him should feel like a dam breaking; instead it’s more like someone quickly turning on a faucet and then shutting it off because we have to get back to the love story.
I get why they did it. This is Reze’s movie. It’s the Denji/Reze tragedy stretched across an hour and a half and dipped in neon blood. But the result is that Aki and Angel feel like emotional DLC instead of an integrated wound. Knowing what’s coming later in the manga makes that sting more, not less.
Still, as a whole? This is exactly what I wanted from a Chainsaw Man movie and also exactly what I did not want to go through emotionally. It’s gorgeous, it’s vicious, it weaponizes tenderness harder than gore, and it reminded me very specifically what it feels like to finally think, “maybe this time someone actually loves me” and then watch that hope get turned into shrapnel.
Five out of five. Absolutely would not recover from this again.
(Originally posted on Medium by me: https://femcelbassmentdweller.medium...e-d249d10774f5)
I’ve read this arc. I know every beat. I know exactly when the knife twists. And somehow watching it animated made it feel like I was experiencing it for the first time and also like I was being punished for ever hoping Denji could be happy.
The thing that blew me away wasn’t just the “MAPPA cooked” stuff (even though they absolutely did). The action is ridiculous: the choreography feels like it’s being storyboarded by someone in the middle of a manic episode, the colors are screaming, the effects are so extra it circles back around to feeling inevitable. Every fight feels like a natural disaster trying to cosplay as sakuga.
But the brutality of this movie isn’t in the violence. It’s in how normal the romance feels.
Denji and Reze are awkward and sweet in a way that’s so painfully mundane. The late-night pool. The rain. The café. That stupid little bubble of “maybe this time it’s real” that sits in your chest like a soap bubble and you pretend you don’t see how thin it is. He’s not suddenly smarter, or more emotionally literate; he’s just a lonely, abused kid being offered affection for the first time that isn’t transactional or weaponized. And because it’s Chainsaw Man, obviously it’s both of those things, but he doesn’t know that yet.
The beach scene is the one that actually wrecked me. Not the explosions, not the crazy devil forms, not the bodies in silly poses. Just Denji begging: “I don’t care if you say you hate me… I’ll be waiting.”
That’s the moment where the story stops being edgy and just becomes mean. Because that’s not shounen-hero bravado. That’s “I have been abandoned enough times that I will accept literally any terms just to not be left again.”
And then, of course, he is.
It’s worse animated because you can’t escape into the pacing of reading. The movie traps you in it: the voice acting, the hesitation, the way his body language collapses in on itself. There’s no panel border to hide behind, it just sits there and forces you to watch a kid relive your worst relationships in 5.1 surround sound.
One thing that honestly makes me feral is how many people still act surprised that Makima is a Devil. Her eyes are almost identical to Power’s. Yellow with that red ringed iris. At this point, if you’re shocked, you’re basically roleplaying one of those background civilians in the series who just assumes “gee, that woman with terrifying energy and weird eyes is probably just a very dedicated civil servant!” She walks through the movie like a genre error — the romance, the slice-of-life, the spy thriller… and then her, like the system itself, quietly rewiring everything in the background.
If I have a complaint, it’s Aki and Angel Devil. Angel is one of my favorite minor characters and in this movie they feel like someone taped together a “best-of” reel and spliced it in between Reze scenes. The skeleton is there — Aki’s exhaustion, his panic about watching more people die, the little flashes of tenderness and horror around Angel — but there’s no time to let it rot properly. His outburst about not wanting to see more people die in front of him should feel like a dam breaking; instead it’s more like someone quickly turning on a faucet and then shutting it off because we have to get back to the love story.
I get why they did it. This is Reze’s movie. It’s the Denji/Reze tragedy stretched across an hour and a half and dipped in neon blood. But the result is that Aki and Angel feel like emotional DLC instead of an integrated wound. Knowing what’s coming later in the manga makes that sting more, not less.
Still, as a whole? This is exactly what I wanted from a Chainsaw Man movie and also exactly what I did not want to go through emotionally. It’s gorgeous, it’s vicious, it weaponizes tenderness harder than gore, and it reminded me very specifically what it feels like to finally think, “maybe this time someone actually loves me” and then watch that hope get turned into shrapnel.
Five out of five. Absolutely would not recover from this again.
(Originally posted on Medium by me: https://femcelbassmentdweller.medium...e-d249d10774f5)