Film Review: Scarlet (2025)

It's been several months since I watched Scarlet, and I'm still not sure whether I like it or not.

I don't know if I think it's a good movie. I don't know if I think it's a bad movie.

Despite the fact that I have now seen exactly two of his films, I have a decidedly complicated relationship with the work of Mamoru Hosoda. 

The celebrated Wolf Children and the underwhelming Scarlet seem to highlight the best and worst of his work, his weaknesses and his strengths—even if I am, admittedly, not the best person to be judging either.

It also suffers, somewhat, from the cost-cutting and production measures often utilized in anime and anime films specifically (in particular long stretches of no or limited movement). 

Granted, this aspect would probably have felt a lot less jarring if I was watching it on a streaming service rather than in a particularly fancy theatre at a film festival, so I hesitate to judge it too harshly based on that.

It isn't as if there's nothing else to say about it, after all.

In a word, Scarlet feels confused. It's a film at war with itself: its direction is unclear, as if it doesn’t know what it wants to say.

(It's technically a loose retelling of Hamlet, with Scarlet in his place, but this fact is rarely relevant beyond the fact that Scarlet's main motivation is wanting revenge on her uncle Claudius for killing her father.)

The character of Hijiri, clearly intended as a counterpoint to the title character of Scarlet, is underutilized to the point of feeling pointless; as are many of the concepts the film puts forward in general. To an extent, so is Scarlet herself.

The recurring theme of music as a form of connection goes nowhere after a single scene that feels strange and out of place in the story it seems to be trying to tell.

The Otherworld's repeated emphasis on being a place of convergence is never truly relevant, though it feels like it should be; instead, it mostly seems to be a plot device for the modern-day Hijiri's presence in the story. What worldbuilding we do get for the Otherworld in this vein is intriguing, and I would have personally liked for it to have more presence in the story.

This film feels as if it wants to be too many things at once. Many of the things I initially assumed were setup or plot threads that would return never see any payoff.

The actual payoff, the narrative conclusion, is likewise unsatisfying. The events of it appear at odds with its perceived message, though what that message is remains overall unclear.

In the end, Scarlet is a film that paints a picture it fails to live up to. With that said, the themes and ideas portrayed here are still clearly worth exploring, and I feel that a different story (or even a different approach to this one) might have done them justice.