13. Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, dir. Tatsuya Yoshihara
There's a good chance you did not watch the Chainsaw Man anime or read the manga, so you might be a bit overwhelmed jumping into this movie without context. Luckily that context is pretty simple: there's a kid named Denji (Kikunosuke Toya) who has the power to become a superhero with chainsaw hands. Japan is overrun with demons with dangerous, often-absurd powers, and the government has organized a vague yet sinister organization to hunt them down. Denji is being used by said agency and its enigmatic head, Makima (Tomori Kusunoki). He's a horny dumbass, basically what happens if Phillip J. Fry could cut monsters in half with his teeth. Worse, he's surrounded by women each with as much enigmatic danger to fill a Park Chan-wook movie. What kind of trouble is his penis going to get him into this time?
Another anime superhero movie came out in 2025, the newest Demon Slayer movie. I'm not recognizing that thing because it was just several hours of extravagant action and obvious melodrama backstory. Chainsaw Man could just be wacky powers depicted in gorgeous animation. Nobody in these parts are too good for preposterous, yet masterfully-animated fight scenes. However there's always something elevating this Man from mere pulp. In the opening scenes of this movie, Denji and Makima go on a date to see twelve hours-worth of movies (the ideal date, in fact). They find nothing interesting in the mainstream comedies or blockbuster movies the audience around them loves. They're numb to everything until at the end of the night they watch a 1959 Soviet movie set during World War II, Ballad of a Soldier, and suddenly are overcome with emotion in ways they cannot explain--
...
--Actually you know what? We're taking a field trip. Everybody, get up, out of the Chainsaw Man review, it's field trip time!
Ballad of a Soldier, dir. Grigory Chukhray
If you really love movies you should let cinema lead you places, especially under-explored places. I recently discovered that there is a ton of classic Soviet cinema from the studio Mosfilm that is available for free on Youtube, including masterpieces from Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Freakin' Stalker is right there! You have no excuse to have not seen that one yet. That includes 1959's Ballad of a Soldier, found right here.
Here I'll give you 90 minutes to watch it.
Okay? You caught up? Cool.
Fantastic wasn't? Black and white cinema is special. I was crying too at the end, just like the cartoon characters were. There's tons of WWII cinema out there, most of what you'll find easily is about American or Brits, and nearly all of it is set on the front lines, where the action is. This is in fact, my first ever war film I've seen made about Russia by Russians. Notably only the first few minutes of Ballad of a Soldier takes place in combat, the rest is deep within 'friendly' territory, in the endless movement back and forth that also is war. Our hero just wants to fix his mom's roof and is overcome by the confusion of the German invasion and bombings and torn-apart families on his Odyssey home. The narrator tells us from the start that private Alyosha (Vladimir Ivashov) is not surviving this war. And that makes the mere two minutes of interactions he gets to have with his mother (Antonina Maksimova) so heartbreaking. They don't know it, but probably suspect heavily, that this is going to be the last time either of them will meet. On his journey, Alyosha experiences the full breath of relations: a ruined marriage, a rekindled marriage, his own first grasp at love, and finally, the brief stare down with his mother. And still, all that humanity is mere fodder. Whatever promises you make, whatever future there might have been, the front needs bodies, and Alyosha is going to be one of them.
You can think of WWII as this great drama of superman fighting for control of continents, and then there's the reality of what it really was: pure barbarism, vandalism, theft on a scale that is beyond comprehending, theft of an entire generation's worth of futures.
Cool, good field trip, huh?
...
--Yeah, anyway the main topic movie is a relatively silly thing about a guy with chainsaw powers riding a guy with shark powers to fight another superbeing with bomb powers. However, let us not discount teh real loneliness at the heart of Chainsaw Man (which is presumably right next to adorable chainsaw puppy). Denji is a bit of a chucklefuck, who seems actively incurious about his situation, yet still even the smallest moments of humanity end in surreal horror.
I'm starting to wonder if our field trip was more than a little indulgence of mine, maybe I was onto something there. Tatsuki Fujimoto, the author of this manga (and the manga behind 2024's even better movie, Look Back) fills the work with references from everything to Leon: The Professional to Alien, the usual cool genre stuff. But why would this slow sad Soviet movie be at the centerpiece of whatever is happening with Denji? Because he - and even Makima - are trapped just as much as Alyosha, in a kind of war, be it one considerably more high concept. There is the promise of escape, little morsels of touch and pleasure represented by Makima and later the titular Reze (Reina Ueda). But in the end, it all goes back to Chainsaw Man doing what a chainsaw does: cutting things.
Chainsaw Man: The Movie is maybe the best action film of 2025, though that action is full of pain and vast carnage. This is shonen action that relishes in its implications, a big fight scene is also like a natural disaster going off in the middle of a city. Denji has a callus of happy-go-lucky Shonen Jump stupidity to protect him, but this is as much a mask as the pure sadist evil of his opponent. The best parts of this movie are not even the spectacle. It's the opening act of Denji and Reze discovering each other, in an effective romance. even actively being erotic which is bold for a shonen space. There's the excitement of two young people exploring each other, each other's bodies. The said exploration of bodies has a cruel irony when their very biology as Demon People is what is causing all this mayhem. I was making a joke earlier when I talked about "Denji's penis getting him into trouble", but Chainsaw Man is taking that very seriously. When you're Denji, you do not get to have universal coming of age experiences without a lot of screaming and without streets overflowing with blood.
I don't know where this Chainsaw Man franchise is going, I have not read the comics beyond what has been animated. But do not be surprised when another Chainsaw Man theatrical experience makes its way onto a future list.
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