Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc
2025 · Tatsuya Yoshihara
In a brutal war between devils, hunters, and secret enemies, a mysterious girl named Reze has stepped into Denji's world, and he faces his deadliest battle yet, fueled by love in a world where survival knows no rules.
dir. Tatsuya Yoshihara · 2025
MAPPA's theatrical continuation of Chainsaw Man adapts the most beloved stretch of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga: the arrival of Reze, a girl in a café who offers Denji — the devil-hunting boy with a chainsaw for a heart — something he's never had, a reason to imagine an ordinary life. Fujimoto is manga's great cinephile, and the Reze arc is his doomed-romance movie, equal parts rain-soaked tenderness and apocalyptic action; the film honors both registers, swinging from hushed, naturalistic two-shots to some of the most kinetic large-scale destruction the studio has staged. Director Tatsuya Yoshihara keeps the series' signature grounded camera language — handheld drift, shallow focus, the texture of live-action filmmaking imported into animation — so that when the carnage arrives it lands with physical weight. Kenshi Yonezu's theme song 'IRIS OUT' became a phenomenon in its own right, and the film broke opening records in Japan before an unusually wide global release. At its core is a question Fujimoto keeps asking across his work: whether a weapon can also be a person who simply wants to go to school.
Lines of influence
- Akira (1988) — Established the animated large-scale-destruction vocabulary—collapsing overpasses, expanding blast shockwaves and raining debris rendered fully by hand—that MAPPA's city-leveling Reze set-pieces directly extend.
- Ghost in the Shell (1995) — Pioneered importing live-action lens grammar into anime—rack focus, shallow depth of field, telephoto compression—the exact photographic language Reze Arc deploys for its handheld shallow-focus intimacy.
- Léon: The Professional (1994) — Supplies the template of tender, doomed romance between a lethal weapon-of-a-girl and a naive innocent, staged in quiet two-shots wedged between bursts of violence.
- Nikita (1990) — The woman remade by handlers into a deployable assassin—her affection weaponized against her—is the direct precursor to Reze as a Soviet-run bomb-girl ordered to seduce.
- Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) — Fuses the human-whose-body-is-armament with liquid, explosive spectacle, modeling the 'weapon-as-person' pathos Reze literally embodies as a walking bomb.
- Pulp Fiction (1994) — A touchstone of Fujimoto's cinephilia: the tonal-swing cutting that whiplashes from comedy and romance into sudden shocking violence within a single scene.
- Evil Dead II (1987) — Its frantic subjective 'shaky-cam' chase camera and comedy-to-gore tonal whiplash are echoed in Reze Arc's kinetic handheld staging and abrupt mood breaks.
- The End of Evangelion (1997) — Marries apocalyptic-scale annihilation to raw romantic and psychological devastation, plus expressionist iris/flash editing—an antecedent for the film's iris-out motif and emotional-cataclysm scale.
- Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (2001) — Treats an anime like a shot-on-location film through cinephile live-action framing and music-timed cutting, the sensibility Reze Arc inherits in its 'live-action language' staging.
- Redline (2009) — Hand-drawn hyper-kinetic action built on exaggerated impact frames and smear—the animation-craft peer to Yoshihara's physically weighty fight choreography.
- Devilman Crybaby (2018) — Apocalyptic doomed romance in which the beloved is a monster/weapon, told through elastic tonal swings from tenderness to carnage—Fujimoto's tonal register in a peer work.
- Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021) — MAPPA's immediate house-style sibling: a theatrical shonen arc built on simulated handheld, shallow-focus 'camerawork' laid over cursed-energy spectacle.
- Attack on Titan: The Final Season (2020) — MAPPA continuity in large-scale destruction and simulated handheld camera tracking through chaos, the studio's craft lineage feeding Reze Arc's mayhem.
- Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (2020) — The single-arc theatrical shonen film model—an emotional doomed-sacrifice climax welded to bravura spectacle animation—that Reze Arc's release format mirrors.
- Look Back (2024) — A fellow Tatsuki Fujimoto adaptation whose naturalistic, observational handheld framing and mundane two-shots share the author's live-action grammar of quiet intimacy.
- Black Clover (2017) — Yoshihara's own directorial calling card—fluid, weighty fight choreography with dynamic virtual-camera moves and sakuga bursts—is the action signature he carries into Reze Arc.