After being poisoned by her uncle, Scarlet stalks through the afterlife on a quest for revenge. But she meets a stranger who encourages her to follow a different path. Scarlet reminds us that love really is more powerful than hate. But it’s also filled with muddled spirituality and, sometimes, murky themes.
Princesses have it easy, right? They wear sparkling tiaras and frilly gowns. Palace servants cater to their every needs. So pampered is the princess that, even if she sleeps on a veritable tower of mattresses, she’ll still feel a single pea at the very bottom, digging into her back.
Well, unless she’s Princess Scarlet.
Once upon a time, Scarlet might’ve lived the stereotypical life of a princess. Granted, her father was raising her to lead the 16th-century kingdom of Denmark one day, so life wasn’t all balls and sorbet. Still, she wore the dresses. She had the servants. Her father doted on her, and life was full of sunshine.
But then Scarlet’s dastardly uncle, Claudius, accused her pops of treason and had him executed, smiling a cruel grin all the while. Scarlet—though standing next to her uncle, staring horrified—was too far away to hear her father’s last whispered words, words meant for her.
From that moment on, Scarlet’s life was devoid of pampering and peas. Claudius—now king—would have no fear of a little girl.
But a warrior? Oh, yeah. Scarlet could become a warrior all right. She’d show her mean ol’ uncle to execute her father.
After years of training, Scarlet was finally ready to exact her revenge, ready to plunge a dagger into her uncle’s back. But Claudius, long experienced with lethal duplicity, poisoned Scarlet before she had a chance.
Now, Scarlet’s roaming the afterlife—a dreary, dry place called the Otherworld. She hasn’t given up on her quest for revenge, though. Her uncle, it seems, followed her down to the Otherworld shortly after poisoning her. And like the jerk he is, Claudius now jealously guards the Stairway to the Infinite Land—raising an army by promising them a place in paradise.
Scarlet doesn’t care a whit about paradise. She doesn’t let the fact that Claudius is already dead bother her. Scarlet wants to kill Claudius—again—this time sending him to never-ending oblivion.
Her father would’ve wanted it so. Right?
Scarlet has just one purpose as she begins to roam the Otherworld: Kill Claudius. But she runs into a fellow with a very different purpose in mind. His name is Hijiri, and he has the annoying habit of helping people.
A one-time paramedic from the 21st century, Hijiri patches up Scarlet after a nasty battle and stubbornly follows her through the Otherworld’s wastelands. When Scarlet fights nasty enemies, Hijiri often holds out his hand in friendship in the aftermath, treating those enemies’ wounds as best as he can.
When they stumble upon a caravan plowing through the Otherworld’s wastelands, Hijiri convinces a reluctant Scarlet to join it for a time. Many of the caravan members are just as reluctant. They’ve been robbed so often in the Otherworld: How can they trust this young warrior princess and her very, very odd squire? But Hijiri soon proves himself trustworthy. He treats illnesses, scrubs ancient wounds and does his best to learn how to play the lute—earnestly practicing as more experienced musicians laugh. And through kindness and perseverance, Hijiri wins the caravanners over. And he shows Scarlet that sometimes a little love and kindness can break down walls that no siege engine ever could.
It works on the metaphorical walls around Scarlet, too. The young princess begins to wonder whether there’s more to life—well, more to the afterlife—than revenge.
Scarlet is not, as we’ll see, an explicitly Christian story. But Hijiri does serve as a sort of Christ-like avatar here. He embodies some sacrificial tendencies, and he tells Scarlet that his name is written “with the [Japanese] character meaning ‘sacred.’”
Because Scarlet is set in Renaissance-era Denmark (and very loosely based on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet), other Christian elements find their way into the film as well. A critical scene plucked right from Hamlet depicts Claudius asking God to forgive his many, many misdeeds. “These bloody hands,” he says. “my sins … There’s nothing else now but to pray for salvation. Or is it too late for these things?”
We hear references to prayer elsewhere, as well as someone asking for God to bless the king. When Scarlet first meets Hijiri, she asks if he’s a monk. “Get thee to a monastery!” she shouts at him—another nod toward Hamlet. In the Otherworld, we see soldiers wearing crosses on their garments. (We assume that they lost their lives during the Crusades.)
But Scarlet isn’t tromping around in a Christian afterlife. The film hints that it’s a sort of hell: Hijiri translates words on a rocky arch as “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,” echoing a line from Dante’s Inferno. But this is no afterlife of sin-appropriate eternal damnation. “Everyone thinks we go to heaven or hell when we die,” Scarlet tells Hijiri. “But we all come here [the Otherworld] without exception.”
That here feels like a waypoint on the road to your ultimate destination—which, it would appear for most, is utter oblivion. When people are “killed” in the Otherworld, they essentially turn into ash and blow away. And while the film does suggest a heavenly realm beyond the Otherworld (that Stairway to the Infinite Land, a much-coveted rumor for most), the door to it is locked and barred.
This world is presided over by what looks to be a shaman, and she tells us that “life and death coexist” in the Otherworld. Plenty of religious traditions seem to coexist, as well. We see people from multiple cultures comingling with one another. In the caravan that Scarlet and Hijiri join, a woman from Polynesia leads an extended spiritual dance (with the help of a couple of partners). “Human words mean nothing to god,” one of the participants says. “So we send our feelings through dance.” Throughout the film, music can indeed take the form of prayer, with subtitles indicating petitions to the almighty for love, life and hope.
One other wrinkle: The Otherworld is patrolled by a gigantic dragon—a monster with so many swords and spears sticking out of him, they almost look like beard stubble. He sometimes appears when folks fight and strikes down the fighters with lightning—serving, it seems, as a manifestation of divine judgment against violence.
Claudius’ motivations in killing the rightful king of Denmark extend beyond the throne: He wants to marry the king’s wife (and Scarlet’s mother), Gertrude. They’re already embroiled in an affair, and it’s Gertrude who prods Claudius into murder. She tells him that she belongs to the one who wears the crown. And as she slips off her dress in Claudius’ presence (we see her bare shoulders), Gertrude says, “If your resolve to be king is true, show me.”
Scarlet develops feelings for Hijiri. She cements those feelings when she takes an unexpected vision trip into the “future,” to Hijiri’s time, and the two engage in an extended dance sequence in a 21st-century city. When she returns to the Otherworld and finds Hijiri holding her, she tells him how well he danced. Later, the two share a kiss.
Claudius may be the villain in Scarlet. But the real enemy? Violence itself. The movie’s message is essentially a pacifistic one, with Hijiri’s love and kindness trumping Scarlet’s thirst for revenge and the rest of the Otherworld’s obsession with blood.
But this pacifistic movie still sheds a lot of animated blood en route to its gentle moral. People’s will to “hate and kill each other prevails, even in the underworld,” we’re told.
The moment Scarlet enters the Otherworld, she’s forced to pull away from countless zombie-like hands trying to drag her under a pool of blood and body parts. She fights plenty of warriors from other times and places, too—killing most of them via sword or spear. (When these adversaries “die,” they vanish into ash.) She fights and defeats a couple of familiar adversaries from her time among the living, leaving them severely bruised and bloody. And at one juncture, Scarlet seems primed to literally rip off someone’s face.
Hijiri’s work as an afterlife paramedic can contain some bloody moments as well. He applies a tourniquet to one of Scarlet’s wounds. Sometimes, the people he’s trying to treat “die” anyway, fading into dust. He tells Scarlet that his paramedic friends told him he can’t be sad every time someone dies. But he remains sensitive. “If you get used to death and your heart grows numb, you might lose something else,” he says.
A massive battle takes place on the mountains of the Otherworld. We see people fight, fall and die—succumbing to a variety of weapons, including swords, arrows, guns and cannons. Some are consumed by lava that inexplicably starts running down the side of the mountain, and we see bodies encased in the drying volcanic rock.
People die via divine lightning. A couple of people are poisoned, and we see one character’s lips stained and gray. Scarlet is yanked around by her hair at one point. Someone is knocked off a huge precipice. Scarlet’s father is killed by sword-wielding executioners: We don’t see the lethal blows, but we do see the man’s dead body, blood pooling and dribbling off the execution platform.
We hear that the people of Denmark are starving under Claudius’ reign, but he refuses to send aid. Claudius talks of his desire to pour poison into his brother’s ear. In the 21st-century present, a man holding a bloody knife walks toward a group of school children before his way is barred. People hit, kick and occasionally butt heads.
Bandits rob, knock down and injure several people. (“Why must we endure this even after death?” one victim laments.) Someone says that it feels like his heart is “filled with scorpions.” Scarlet gets knocked off a horse. We hear about someone’s ears and nose getting hacked off. Claudius laments that he didn’t torture Scarlet’s father enough: “I should have drained his blood and stripped the meat from his bones!”
In one dream-like sequence, Scarlet is confronted by a pair of gravediggers. They point to the graves of violent men, namechecking Alexander and Caesar. They beckon Scarlet to come closer to see their latest grave—and quickly push her into the coffin.
Four uses of the word “d–n” and one misuse of “h—.” God’s name is also misused once.
Wine is served at Denmark parties and, in some cases, apparently poisoned.
Struggling through the Otherworld, Scarlet drinks from a rare pool of water and, shortly thereafter, retches it up.
As mentioned, Scarlet is very loosely based on what is arguably Shakespeare’s most celebrated play, Hamlet. The two respective protagonists of these stories share a tragic backstory and a desire for revenge. But while Hamlet’s protagonist was ultimately consumed by that revenge, fate gives Scarlet an almost Jiminy Cricket-style conscience in the form of Hijiri.
As Hijiri and Scarlet trek through the bleak and embittered Otherworld, Hijiri reminds Scarlet that she can do more with her afterlife than seek revenge. Violence, he says, is not the answer. “If it doesn’t stop somewhere, we go on fighting forever,” he says.
It’s a simple, and some would say simplistic, message. As Ecclesiastes tells us, there is a time for everything—even war. But Hijiri puts his philosophy in action, and we can see that love and kindness aren’t just Pollyannish philosophies: No, the stuff actually works. Kindness binds people together. Love forms friendships. And those human connections get us through all manner of hard times.
Hijiri—whose name, you’ll remember, translates as “sacred”—is an anime manifestation on true love. On, in a way, biblical love. “And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony,” Paul writes in Colossians 3:14. And that love, Hijiri would add, is our only hope in a very imperfect world—or Otherworld.
Perhaps fittingly, Scarlet comes with its own jumbled table of issues. Aesthetically, the movie looks pretty amazing, its powerful imagery and fluid animation filling the screen with wonders. But it trots out its share of horrors, too. We see loads of violence and death, which pushes this film well into PG-13 territory. Both its spirituality and themes can feel pretty muddled at times, too.
Scarlet tells us how grief can twist us and how revenge can corrupt us. But it forgets that onscreen violence—even in the service of a pacifistic message—can impact us, too.
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.
