‘Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc’ review: Deliriously provocative rapture of freaks delivers the year’s very best

There are rom-coms where the lovers meet in the rain. And then there’s Chainsaw Man, where the lovers meet in the rain, share a kiss under fireworks, and then promptly attempt to slice, maim and obliterate each other into pieces. This is Tatsuki Fujimoto’s summer romance.

For an anime about a boy with chainsaws sprouting from his head and arms, Chainsaw Man has always had a surprisingly fragile heart. The new film finds it beating harder (and bleeding more freely) than ever. It is both a continuation of the cult hit’s anime series and an outlandish stand-alone meditation on loneliness, desire, and the futility of thinking you can have nice things when your chest cavity houses a literal demon.

A still from ‘Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc’
| Photo Credit:
Sony Pictures

Denji, a teenage devil hunter whose main aspirations in life are touching breasts and eating decent food, meets Reze, a purple-haired barista with emerald eyes and a teasing laugh, who seems too good to be true. Their flirtations involve coffee dates, midnight skinny dips, and fireworks blooming overhead. It doesn’t take long before the facade cracks, and Reze reveals herself to be a literal weapon of mass destruction. 

The first act glows with an Ephron-esque rom-com delicacy, with handheld reflections on rainy sidewalks and Denji’s pubescent internal monologues proclaiming how his body is on autopilot. The true perversity is how tender it all feels. Reze teaches Denji to swim with the softness of a teen movie heroine, and ten minutes later, she is pulling the pin from her own neck to transform into a living bomb. The juxtaposition is funny in the way a pratfall is funny, right until you realise the pratfall now stands before you with the severed heads of your colleagues in hand.

As the animation studio infamous for simultaneously redefining the medium and grinding its animators into dust, MAPPA stages the affair with a level of craft that borders on masochism. The first act sways with soft pastels and the warm glow of movie theatre marquees. By the second, those same palettes combust into jagged explosions and suffocating greys, with the screen erupting with body parts and shrapnel. The transition feels almost deliberately cruel, and instantly reminiscent of the kind of trauma MAPPA cooked up for Jujutsu Kaisen’s sophomore season.

The incredible voice artists carry the joke with a straight face. Kikunosuke Toya nails Denji’s endearing idiocy as a boy who believes every pretty girl might finally see him for who he is. Reina Ueda’s Reze is a velvet menace, and her sultry pivots from first-date giggles to full-body detonation without missing a beat. Good ‘ol Natsuki Hanae trades his katana-wielding exploits as Tanjiro from Demon Slayer for the shark-headed comic relief Beam, who would happily die for his chainsaw-headed comrade.

Kensuke Ushio’s score is the film’s secret weapon. His compositions flit from whispery distortions during Denji and Reze’s kiss to operatic crescendos as entire city blocks collapse. Even the sound of a fuse sizzling seems ripe with double entendres for foreplay.

Reze Arc also sneaks a surprisingly moving love letter to cinema itself. There’s that matinee marathon where Denji and Makima gorge on movies until they’re finally convinced that the flicker of a projector is reason enough to stay alive. It’s unpretentious, almost embarrassingly earnest, and it sets up the cruel gag that the “final scene” of their own story will blow them away.

The film’s chaotic climax is like God sketching on a napkin at 3 AM. It’s replete with homages to blockbuster classics, with Texas Chainsaw Massacre spliced with Jaws, a tornado or two straight out of Twister, and more gratuitous explosions than Michael Bay has ever managed to pack into a summer. It’s deranged, excessive and almost camp, but it also feels like Fujimoto tipping his hat to the ridiculous, transformative thrill of watching moving pictures do exactly what they were never (read: always) meant to do.

Comparisons to Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle are inevitable. Both films arrived in close succession, and both flaunted state-of-the-art animation. At this point, anime theatres have become dumping grounds for Frankensteined “event arcs” cynically inflated into feature films. Reze Arc feels like the rarest of beasts, with devilish blood in its veins instead of a brand strategy. It shreds through the high bar set by Demon Slayer’s recent juggernaut with the sheer fluidity of its hand-drawn animation. Every frame vibrates with a purity that CG simply can’t counterfeit.

A still from ‘Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc’
| Photo Credit:
Sony Pictures

The real win is that this isn’t a film engineered for the masses. If the grand, operatic scale of Demon Slayer had characters belting their grief to the rafters in frequent bouts of shounen melodrama, then Chainsaw Man’s spectacle feels corrosively designed to leave you uneasy about what you just enjoyed. This is a fever dream carved up for the maladjusted, the terminally online, and the weirdest of weirdos who recognise in Denji’s mangled yearning a kind of cracked holiness. Chainsaw Man is something stranger, funnier and crueler. Chainsaw Man is for the freaks.

Is it exploitative to make something so gorgeous out of so much misery? Probably. But that seems to be the secret sauce to Chainsaw Man. It is grotesque, exhilarating, cynical, steamy, pulpy and profound. One could call it overindulgent. One would also be wrong. Call it instead the definitive anime film of the year, not because it’s perfect (which it is), but because it’s too gloriously unhinged to be anything else.

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc is currently running in theatres

Published – September 26, 2025 06:32 pm IST