Hit Manga Gets an Ultra-Violent, Surprisingly Emotional Big-Screen Adaptation

First, a confession: I’ve never read the manga series by Tatsuki Fujimoto on which this film is based. Nor have I watched the hit animated television series adapted from it. So, like probably no one else at the promotional screening I attended, I came to Chainsaw Man — The Movie: Reze Arc totally cold.

Sure, I had done some homework. I knew that the title character, Denji (Kikunosuke Toya), is a teenager who was killed by the yakuza and, thanks to a sacrifice by his Chainsaw Devil dog Pochita (Shiori Izawa), was reborn with the ability to transform parts of his body into chainsaws. And that he works with the Public Safety Devil Hunters, a government agency tasked with ridding Japan of Devils. (There’s much, much more, but your eyes may glaze over.) So I naturally assumed that this big-screen continuation would feature plenty of manga-style violence, especially since it garnered an R rating.

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What I didn’t expect was that the film, or at least its first half, would be a tender story of teenage romance.

But so it is, although it eventually features plenty of the phantasmagoric action sequences for which the show is celebrated. But before that, we see Denji attend a series of movies with his Devil Hunters boss Makima (Tomori Kusunoki), with whom he’s totally infatuated. (We see excerpts from them, complete with screens within the screen, in a nice visual touch.) She criticizes all the films they see, commenting that only one in ten movies is any good (everyone’s a critic!). But when the pair finally see a drama that they appreciate, the tears streaming down their faces only cement Denji’s ardor.

Of course, he’s still a teenager, which means that his romantic attention proves fleeting. When he has a chance encounter with Reze (Reina Ueda), a bubbly young woman who works at a nearby café, he becomes instantly besotted. After they meet up a few times, she offers to teach him swimming. And when she takes off her clothes to go skinny-dipping and urges him to do the same, his rampaging hormones make him react like, well, a cartoon character.

It’s not much of a spoiler, especially to fans, to reveal that Reze is not quite who she says she is. And when her romance with Denji threatens to become lethal, their love story turns twisted and incites a series of battles that could destroy Tokyo.

It’s admirable, and more than a little surprising, that director Tatsuya Yoshihara and screenwriter Hiroshi Seko keep the film’s first half simmering at such a low boil, albeit infused with elements of animated eroticism. But it has the beneficial result of effectively raising the emotional stakes for the non-stop action fueling the second half, in which the Devil Hunters fight for their lives against the very lethal Reze even while Denji can’t quite accept the fact that their love isn’t real. Meanwhile, Reze can’t believe that he’s been so gullible, literally laughing in his face as she’s trying to kill him.

As for those over-the-top, extremely gory action sequences, they’re tremendously visceral, the eye-popping animation, propulsive musical score and deafening sound effects (there’s a reason Sony wants you to see the film, released in both Japanese and English-dubbed versions, in IMAX and other premium formats) delivering an enveloping, nearly psychedelic experience. It’s safe to say that manga and anime fans won’t be disappointed, even if they’ll inevitably be nitpicking about one narrative aspect or another.

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