‘Reze Arc’ Is ‘Chainsaw Man’ Polished to Explosive, Lush, and Unhinged Perfection

If Mappa’s anime catalog were a zoo, Chainsaw Man would always be the gorilla—stoic, strange, and hypnotic in its stillness. You’d watch it for hours, transfixed by the uncanny way it made even the mundanity of its movements feel mythic, and lament its exhibit’s closure, leading your noble oaf to vanish for three agonizing years. 

Finally, Chainsaw Man returns, but not as the beast you remember, but as something bespoke. Sleeker. Wilder. Tenderer. Louder. Drenched in technicolor rage, reshaped in its absence, and sharpened by years of tapping on the glass of its enclosure, begging it to wake. Still your beast. Just more. 

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, out October 24 in theaters and IMAX, is that beast beating its chest in full force as a cinematic benchmark that every subsequent anime film of its ilk will be weighed against for years to come. 

At its core, Chainsaw Man is a coming-of-age story, and Reze Arc sharpens that focus. Denji, still bound by obedience to Makima as a devil hunter, finds himself disarmed by Reze, a mysterious girl who offers warmth and wreckage in equal measure to his life as the new girl next door after his heart—literally. Their meet-cute romance is tender, chaotic, and ultimately tragic, pushing Denji into his most emotionally charged battle yet.

Unlike many anime films that feel like extended trailers, Reze Arc definitely stands alone. It’s concise, complete, and emotionally devastating. From Kenshi Yonezu’s carnival opener “Iris Out†to Hikaru Utada’s haunting “Jane Doe,†the original soundtrack is a masterclass in tonal range, enhancing the ebb and flow of its most exuberant and subdued scenes.

Visually, Reze Arc is a revelation. From the first frame, it asserts itself as a cinematic experience that’s less an appendage of the anime and more a reinvention. Throughout the film, Mappa abandons the TV series’ more muted palette for a riot of vivid, sometimes aberrant colors.

As if breaking even, the film preserves the anime’s hallmark cinematic wide-frame and macro close-up camera movements—because it is the movie, after all—while leaning more heavily on the playfully fluid character acting of the manga, embracing movement and saturation with reckless, yet concentrated abandon. What’s more, the film enriches its visual presence by paying homage to the manga’s iconic cover pages while flexing its animation muscles, pushing the medium to dazzling new heights as if challenging its contemporaries to scramble to get on its level.

Narratively, Reze Arc feels surprisingly rich, even within its 1-hour and 40-minute runtime. Like a firework, the film bursts with emotionally stirring brilliance that you can feel just as much as you can see, deepening Chainsaw Man‘s ongoing exploration of Denji’s gradual and painful journey toward agency. Where the anime often lingered in bleak absurdity, this chapter sharpens its focus, using romance as a scalpel to get to Denji’s heart.

Reze enters the film named for her like a dream: tender, teasing, and disarmingly warm. A foreign pulse in Denji’s world, she practically muscles Makima out of frame with every smile. Their flirtation hums like a rom-com wired to explode as Denji, starving for affection and affirmation, dares to imagine love not predicated on dogged obedience. A life of his own making and a whimsical romance with both parties on equal footing.

But Reze isn’t just a love interest. She’s a catalyst. A lifeline exposes the festering hollowness of Denji’s inverted hierarchical pyramid, briefly teaching him what it means to want more—to swim through life under his own power, toward a future of his own accord. And when the other shoe drops, when Reze’s mask slips and her costive motives curdle, the reentry flames of romance plummeting back to earth hit you with a deafening boom.

Throughout its runtime, Reze Arc whipsaws between tones—disarmingly funny, viscerally horrific, and gloriously bombastic. One moment it’s all slapstick and smirks; the next, it’s blood, dread, and kinetic chaos. All the while, its animation is a visual tempest teeming with impactful frames, fluid motion, and optical madness, rendered with precision and hauntingly alluring charm between every brilliant frame of action and quiet flicker of melancholic romance. It’s pure cinema in freefall, a spectacle violently twisting and then unfurling into something strange and sublime in real time, demanding surrender and rewarding awe.

And in that storm’s eye, time dilates, and the violence slows, refracting into something more fragile. Each combative flash of Reze’s bomb devil flames clashes with the grind of Denji’s metal chainsaw teeth, sparking an explosion. Reze’s flames from Denji’s chainsaw radiate into a molten gleam like fireworks in slow motion. What should be ruin becomes an elegy in motion. The city crumbles like tissue paper in their wake, not with fury but with grace, as if puddles giving rise to the sweet smell of petrichor beneath their delicate ballet dancing through Rolland Emmerich-level disaster film devastation. Choreographing heartbreak into something almost holy.

Reze Arc isn’t just worth the wait—it’s destined to endure. A fever dream of heartbreak and spectacle that lingers like a scar, this resolute Chainsaw Man film is utterly unforgettable and bound to carry through as one of the most euphoric anime films in recent memory.

Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc releases in theaters on October 24.

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