Shortly after last month’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle – confirmed last weekend as the highest-grossing anime feature of all time – a big-screen outing for a movie adaptation of what, in manga terms, is a relative upstart: Tatsuki Fujimoto’s gore-soaked coming-of-age saga, first serialised in 2018. Standard critical guidance applies: what will doubtless be catnip for fans is likely to prove varyingly baffling for newcomers, arriving late to a frenetic game offering few chances for catchup. The latter camp might, however, cling to the Halloween-adjacent release date as a partial decryption device: Fujimoto’s teenage hero Denji (voiced by Kikunosuke Toya) has a chainsaw-wielding demon squatting in his soul, suggesting the twin influences of Tobe Hooper and Shinya Tsukamoto.
The fallout from this will be, to coin a phrase, exaggerated – but the underlying emotions remain legible, maybe even relatable. Dopey slacker Denji is torn between two romantic prospects: notionally nice girl Makita, who appeals to his cultured side, and freckled, jade-eyed waitress Reze, who invites our boy to break into school after hours to skinny-dip. She’s a gal to elevate his heart rate; pity she’s also hellbent on ripping Denji’s heart out.
The film’s artistry is undeniable: director Tatsuya Yoshihara and team sketch ultra-photorealistic urban environments, making it only more striking when Reze pulls a grenade-pin from her neck, exploding her earthly form, and when a possessed Denji, bearing chainsaws for arms, launches a counterattack atop his shark familiar.
Before a final descent into exhausting city trashing, its gleeful perversity is semi-interesting: what the success of these titles tells us is that there’s an audience whose desires aren’t currently being met by Hollywood pencil-pushers. Man, is it male-oriented, though. From Denji’s frilly pink fantasies to the fact Reze becomes more pornographic in appearance the more demonic she gets, Yoshihara is not shy about courting those who might have felt uniquely wronged by the opposite sex. “What a rush!” Denji squawks, in one such incel-friendly indelicacy. “I just cut off a beautiful woman’s leg.”
