Denji fights devils for a living using sentient chainsaws that spring out of his body. But, like most 16-year-olds, he’s also crushing on girls. He has two crushes right now, and it’s tearing him up. Just in time for a few devils to try to tear him up far more literally.
Young love is always heavy on drama. But when you can pull a cord in your chest and turn into a collection of sentient chainsaws, the drama can get ratcheted up a bit.
Let me back up.
Meet Denji, a 16-year-old guy who shares his body with a demonic, chainsaw-wielding pooch named Pochita. Despite his internal, infernal pal, Denji currently works as a devil hunter (devils are everywhere in Tokyo, apparently) to pay the bills. And that’s just fine.
But could there be more to life than just sawing devils into itty bitty bits?
Apparently! When Denji and his beautiful, red-haired, devil-killing boss, Makima, spend a day at the movies together, he learns they like the same movies. Makima leans over, presses her ear against Denji’s chest and announces that, yes, Denji has a heart.
Denji’s officially smitten: That heart now belongs to Makima.
But wouldn’t you know it, Denji soon gets caught in a phone booth during a downpour with another awfully cute girl. Her name’s Reze, and she works at a nearby coffee shop. She flirts as only a coquettish barista can, and she encourages Denji to visit her there. The coffee’s terrible, but Denji keeps showing up.
Denji insists that his heart belongs to Makima. But the rest of him is drawn to Reze. It’s a complicated love triangle, to be sure.
And that’s before we even start talking about the Bomb Devil, an aptly named entity that would very much like to either run away or do away with Denji. Perhaps both.
No, the course of young love never runs smooth, as they say. But in this case, it sure runs with blood.
Denji and his colleagues belong to Tokyo’s government-run Public Safety Division, an operation dedicated to quelling the city’s infestation of devils (even though some are half devils themselves). That, on balance, is a good thing. They like to save innocent people’s lives when they can. And they show a great deal of loyalty to one another, too, routinely risking their own lives to protect those of their friends.
Let’s start with the devils:
According to the original Chainsaw Man manga, the franchise’s demons are created from humanity’s collective fears—making them walking, talking, killing metaphors for what keeps us up at night. The Bomb Devil is a frighteningly powerful being who moves and fights via explosions. We hear about the Gun Devil, the apparent big bad in Chainsaw Man’s first narrative manga arc.
The stronger humanity’s collective fear is over an issue, the stronger its accompanying devil is as well. But while these beings serve as narrative metaphors, they’re also quite literal demons, birthed in hell and sometimes sent back there after being killed on Earth.
(An aside: One of the reasons why Denji/Chainsaw Man is a big deal is because he can eliminate the devil entirely. As such, in the alternate world of the original manga, AIDS and nuclear weapons have been not only eradicated, but completely forgotten—thanks to Denji dispatching their corresponding devils.)
But, as in Denji’s case, humans and devils can also merge and become “fiends.” As mentioned, Denji can spout chainsaws from his limbs to fight devils. Another good example would be Denji’s workmate Power, a girl with four horns. Like Denji, she fights devils for a living, but if she ingests too much blood after a battle (blood is how some characters regenerate and grow more powerful), she’ll turn on the good guys. It seems again to be a metaphor for how power itself can be used for good or evil.
Another curious character worth noting: Angel Devil, who appears as a rather androgynous boy. He’s seemingly both a real angelic being and a manifestation of society’s fears of the divine. In the context of the film, it seems like he’d like to help humanity, but he’s just too tired and lazy to do much. At one point, he says he wouldn’t mind dying, because it means he wouldn’t have to work so hard.
It’s interesting that Angel Devil carries the hallmarks of a Christian angel, complete with wings and a halo. Even though Christians make up just 1% of Japan’s population, Chainsaw Man liberally uses Christian motifs here, with multiple references to church and a brief depiction of a cemetery festooned with Christian crosses.
Denji is 16 years old, and Reze appears to be about the same age. But both are wholly unsupervised and, one night, they make their way to an empty school campus. Reze eventually lures Denji to the school’s outdoor pool, where Reze strips off her clothes and invites Denji to do the same.
Denji complies, and the two skinny-dip for quite a while. While genitals are obscured, everything else is on full display (though Reze’s body looks more like that of a Barbie doll than a real woman).
In an odd fantasy sequence, Denji pictures all the girls he likes (or has liked), and it includes a very lengthy, sensuous depiction of both Makima and Reze in provocative, skimpy lingerie. Other women are shown in states of sultry undress. Also a part of the montage: Angel Devil, seemingly a pre-pubescent boy. (In his internal monologue, Denji seems puzzled why he showed up.)
When Denji is paired with Beam (a part-human, part-shark fiend), Beam is over the moon. The shirtless demon hunter idolizes Denji and seems to want to pick him up and hug him. “Don’t touch me!” Denji says. “I’m not into men!”
Bomb Devil also seems to have a strong aversion to clothes. She essentially pairs a set of panties with a black apron, and she tells some of her adversaries that she’s “almost naked.”
Reze makes some references to various private body parts, and Denji jokes that she’s a “sex-starved girl.” Denji and Reze go on a date and find a secluded spot from which to watch some fireworks. Reze asks Denji to run away with her. And when he seems reluctant, she kisses him passionately …
… and bites his tongue off. She spits the skin out, and both of their mouths run red with blood.
It’s not the movie’s first violent scene, but it is the opening volley in a ludicrously violent movie.
We see multiple bodies severed at the waist. Others lose limbs (a disembodied hand still clutching a gun lies on a sidewalk, for instance), and two humans are decapitated, the killer swinging their heads in her hands before throwing them to the ground.
And all this dismemberment discounts Chainsaw Man and Bomb Devil. Those two fiends apparently lose limbs as a matter of course. Chainsaw Man is repeatedly “blown up” until his regenerative powers are seemingly halted. Bomb Devil rips off her own head at one juncture, tossing it into a building as if it were a grenade.
Lots of people—including innocent bystanders—are killed, and villains can’t be bothered to step over the bodies: They step on them instead. A sentient storm (the Typhoon Devil) rips through Tokyo, destroying buildings, uprooting cars and nearly sweeping away several characters. Bomb Devil causes at least one character to apparently explode (though we later see him, evidently recovered, gasping on a beach). Beam, who can turn into a giant, six-eyed shark, swallows someone whole in an effort to save him.
A character talks about how he defeated a hard-hearted demon hunter. He kidnapped the hunter’s wife and kids, skinned them and showed the hunter their “hides.” (He tells the story as a woman, incapacitated and bleeding, whimpers in an adjoining room. When he’s done with his story, the man walks out with a knife, apparently to do something awful to the woman.) The guy later attacks Reze, hoping to skin her and pluck out her eyes to encourage Denji to give up his own fight.
Someone is strangled. A female character punches Denji in the gut, incapacitating him. A throat is fatally cut. A character seemingly drowns. Someone’s skewered with a spear. Blood flies everywhere in this film—at one juncture literally flooding the streets.
[Plugged In viewed this film in Japanese, with English subtitles.]
We hear (or rather read) two s-words, along with a few uses each of “a–,” “h—” and “d–n.”
None.
Denji eats a flower then later coughs it back up. A character excuses herself to go to the bathroom. When she walks out of the loo, she faces a villain who quips that he needs to use the restroom himself.
When Makima and Denji spend a day at the movies together, they’re largely unimpressed by the fare. The comedies aren’t funny. The scary movies aren’t scary. The sad movies don’t make either of them cry.
What do they like? A far quieter film, apparently, featuring a scene in which an old man and old woman slowly shuffle toward each other and tenderly hug. That’s the movie they talk about after their marathon day. That’s the film that moves them both to tears.
Yeah, Chainsaw Man—The Movie: Reze Arc is pretty much the antithesis of that. Which makes it quite possible that Denji and Makima might hate their own film.
Sure, anime loves and often leans into the bizarre. The genre’s movies and shows are filled with dragons and demons and demigods, with characters playing fast and loose with religious doctrine and the laws of physics. Even relatively staid properties such as Pokémon feature evil balloons and sentient bags of trash.
But Reze Arc takes the phrase “unhinged” to another level. This is as unhinged as the front door of Dorothy’s house as it flew over the land of Oz. It’s a fever dream as experienced by a sentient nuclear bomb explosion. When you see a man with the head of a chainsaw riding a six-eyed, spider-legged shark across the sides of buildings as a baby typhoon god tries to capture it with purple tentacles, you know you’re watching a film seeking to rewrite the definition of crazy.
If Reze Arc was just crazy, that might make the thing sort of fun. But no, it couldn’t just stop with six-eyed spider sharks. It had to give us naked underage characters taking sultry swims together. It had to give us an androgynous angel-demon that would very much like to just eat ice cream. It had to give us spurting blood and flying body parts and some incredibly disturbing visuals.
During a lull in their movie-watching day, Makima admits to Denji that she dislikes about nine out of every 10 movies she sees. But that tenth? It’s one that she’ll remember forever.
As a movie reviewer, that ratio feels just about right. And, sure, there is a chance that I might remember Reze Arc for a long, long time. Too bad it’s for all the wrong reasons.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
