🔗 Share this article

Two teenagers experience a intimate, gentle instant at the local secondary school’s open-air pool after hours. While they drift as one, suspended beneath the night sky in the stillness of the evening, the scene captures the fleeting, exhilarating excitement of teenage love, completely caught up in the present, ramifications overlooked.

Approximately 30 minutes into The Chainsaw Man Film: Reze Arc, I realized these scenes are the core of the movie. The romantic tale became the focus, and every bit of background details and backstories previously known from the series’ initial episodes proved to be largely unnecessary. Despite being a canonical installment within the franchise, Reze Arc offers a more accessible entry point for newcomers — even if they missed its prior content. The approach has its benefits, but it simultaneously limits some of the tension of the movie’s narrative.

Created by Tatsuki Fujimoto, Chainsaw Man follows the protagonist, a debt-ridden Devil Hunter in a world where Devils embody specific evils (including concepts like getting older and obscurity to terrifying entities like cockroaches or World War II). When he’s betrayed and murdered by the criminal syndicate, he forms a contract with his loyal devil-dog, Pochita, and returns from the deceased as a chainsaw-human hybrid with the power to permanently erase fiends and the terrors they represent from existence.

Plunged into a violent struggle between devils and hunters, Denji meets Reze — a charming coffee server concealing a lethal mystery — sparking a tragic clash between the pair where affection and existence collide. This film picks up right after the first season, delving into the main character’s connection with Reze as he wrestles with his feelings for her and his loyalty to his controlling boss, Makima, compelling him to decide among desire, faithfulness, and survival.

A Self-Contained Romantic Tale Amidst a Broader World

Reze Arc is inherently a lovers-to-enemies plot, with our fallible protagonist the hero falling for his counterpart right away upon meeting. He’s a isolated boy looking for love, which renders him vulnerable and easily swayed on a first-come, first-served. Consequently, in spite of all of Chainsaw Man’s intricate mythology and its large cast of characters, Reze Arc is very self-contained. Director the director recognizes this and ensures the love story is at the center, rather than bogging it down with unnecessary summaries for the new viewers, particularly since none of that really matters to the overall plot.

Despite the protagonist’s flaws, it’s hard not to sympathize with him. He is still a teenager, fumbling his way through a reality that’s distorted his understanding of morality. His desperate longing for love makes him come off like a lovesick dog, even if he’s prone to growling, biting, and causing chaos along the way. Reze is a ideal pairing for Denji, an compelling femme fatale who targets her prey in our hero. You want to see Denji win the ire of his affection, despite Reze is obviously hiding a secret from him. So when her true nature is revealed, audiences can’t help but hope they’ll somehow succeed, even though internally, you know a happy ending is never really in the cards. Therefore, the stakes don’t feel as intense as they should be since their romance is doomed. This is compounded by that the film serves as a direct sequel to the first season, leaving little room for a love story like this amid the darker developments that followers are aware are approaching.

Breathtaking Visuals and Artistic Execution

The film’s visuals seamlessly blend 2D animation with 3D environments, delivering impressive visual appeal even before the action begins. Including cars to tiny desk fans, 3D models enhance realism and texture to each shot, making the 2D characters pop beautifully. In contrast to Demon Slayer, which frequently highlights its digital elements and changing backgrounds, Reze Arc uses them more sparingly, particularly evident during its explosive finale, where those models, while not unattractive, are more apparent to spot. Such fluid, dynamic environments render the film’s fights both spectacular to watch and remarkably easy to follow. Still, the technique excels most when it’s unnoticeable, improving the vibrancy and motion of the hand-drawn art.

Final Impressions and Wider Considerations

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc serves as a solid point of entry, probably resulting in new fans pleased, but it additionally carries a drawback. Telling a self-contained story restricts the stakes of what should feel like a sprawling anime epic. This is an example of why continuing a popular anime season with a movie isn’t the best approach if it weakens the franchise’s general storytelling potential.

Whereas Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle succeeded by concluding several seasons of animated series with an grand film, and JuJutsu Kaisen 0 sidestepped the issue entirely by acting as a prequel to its popular series, Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc charges forward, perhaps a bit recklessly. However this does not prevent the movie from proving to be a enjoyable time, a excellent point of entry, and a unforgettable love story.