Scarlet

With the film Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda tackles William Shakespeare's Hamlet with a premise that resembles a challenge: the prince becomes a pink-haired Danish princess, she fails in her revenge, dies, and the real story begins in the afterlife. From the outset, as Scarlet wanders through a limbo desert under a sky that moves like a black ocean, with a colossal dragon floating above her head and blades stuck in her body, the film promises to be a metaphysical odyssey of revenge rather than a simple adaptation of Shakespeare. We gradually piece together the life of this young princess who lived in 16th-century Denmark, adored by her father, King Amleth, and discreetly cast aside by her mother, Gertrude, until her uncle, Claudius, orchestrates a coup, brands King Amleth a traitor, and stages his execution as a public spectacle. The central question that runs through the film is disarmingly simple: if your identity is based entirely on revenge, what is left of you once death has already occurred and revenge is still the only thing you can think about?

Visually, Scarlet is clearly the work of Mamoru Hosoda, but one also gets the impression that he has deliberately burned his bridges with his comfort zone. The hybrid aesthetic, halfway between classic 2D character work and intensive digital composition, gives rise to truly breathtaking images: armies from different eras stretching to the horizon in the Other World, caravans of souls crossing rust-colored dunes, the dragon emerging from storm clouds as if it were the very consciousness of the sky. On the big screen, the scale evokes live-action epics. At the same time, this ambition reveals its own limitations: whenever the film returns to purely hand-drawn flashbacks of court life, there is a warmth and fluidity that discreetly surpasses the CGI images, and at several moments when flat faces are superimposed on almost photorealistic backgrounds, the disjunction takes you out of the drama. Compared to the more coherent worlds of Summer Wars, Wolf Children, The Boy and the Beast, Mirai, or Belle, Scarlet feels both more experimental and more uneven: a director relentlessly searching for a new visual language, not always finding it, but sometimes managing to create images that linger in your memory long after the credits roll.

Narratively, the first act in Denmark is the most precise and emotionally controlled part of the film. The relationship between Scarlet and King Amleth, voiced with gentle gravity by Masachika Ichimura, is sketched out with familiar but effective shortcuts: quiet walks through glittering corridors, a father who prefers to teach his daughter compromise rather than the glory of war. When Claudius, played by Koji Yakusho, turns against him, Scarlet trades Hamlet's silent poison for a brutal and public murder: the royal guards dragging King Amleth into the courtyard, the crowd booing him, and Scarlet watching from a balcony as he utters his last inaudible words before the axe falls. One of the most powerful images at the beginning of the film is the moment when she pushes her way through the crowd to discover his already lifeless body and the blood-covered ground; at that moment, her childhood ends and the story of revenge begins. After years of training, she returns, hardened and determined, only to be outwitted at a banquet where Claudius casually hands her a poisoned cup—a cruel inversion of Shakespeare's climax that literally kills the classical structure and plunges us back into the wilderness where the film really wants to live.

It is in the Other World that the film Scarlet finds its most striking ideas and stumbles over its own significance. Time has no meaning in this realm, so Scarlet walks alongside samurai, colonial soldiers, bandits, and refugees, all trudging toward a mountain range whose peaks are said to hide an “Infinite Earth” of peace. Claudius, now a petty tyrant in death as he was in life, has erected a fortress on this path and turned paradise into a frontier he alone controls, recruiting an army with the promise of entering a paradise he has never seen. Into this moral and physical desert falls Hijiri, voiced with gentle conviction by Masaki Okada, a contemporary paramedic who arrives still clutching his medical kit and insisting on returning to work. While Scarlet embodies righteous anger and the logic of an eye for an eye, Hijiri is pure faith in healing, treating the wounds of enemies as willingly as those of friends and visibly recoiling from his reflex to grab his sword. Some of the film's best sequences come from this conflict: a beautiful interlude with a traveling caravan where Hijiri's modern medicine transforms her into a quasi-mythical figure, or a quiet night scene in which Scarlet admits, almost in spite of herself, that saving lives may be changing her more than killing ever did. Yet the script undermines its own heroine by repeatedly placing her in situations where she must be saved—physically or morally—by Hijiri, so that the formidable warrior presented in the prologue often seems strangely ineffective, which is a strange misstep for a film that starts from such a strong feminist premise as its origin.

Thematically, Scarlet is ambitious, to say the least. Mamoru Hosoda uses the Other World as a kind of allegorical pressure cooker: a space where centuries of conflict coexist, where caravans of the dispossessed echo contemporary images of refugees, and where Claudius exploits the despair of the dead with slogans about a better land beyond the walls. On top of that, the dragon, a monstrous presence riddled with the weapons of those who have tried to kill it, becomes a kind of cosmic punctuation mark, appearing at moments when violence reaches its peak to literally rain down judgment from the heavens. This symbolic architecture has flashes of genius, but the script tends to explain its thesis rather than trust these images. Scarlet and Hijiri spend long moments explaining, sometimes in an almost didactic manner, that revenge corrupts the soul and that peace requires an act of forgiveness, so that what could have been a rich meditation on inherited trauma and the stories we tell about war is often reduced to a series of pacifist slogans. The middle section, in particular, suffers from this repetition, even if certain individual scenes—a cairn cemetery, an ecstatic intercultural dance, an encounter at the gates of Claudius's mountain fortress—show a filmmaker capable of merging spectacle and emotion when he focuses.

It is in the final movement that Scarlet briefly becomes the film its opening promised. When Scarlet finally reaches Claudius and realizes how futile his desire for eternity is, Mamoru Hosoda delivers some of the most powerful images of his career: the king-to-be screaming to be saved as the heavens reject him, the dragon's lightning splitting the ranks of his supporters, and, as a counterpoint, a vision of Scarlet in another life, dancing to pop music in a modern city, without a crown, without a sword, and without blood on her hands. The ghost of King Amleth reappears not to ask her to avenge him, but to urge her to break out of the vicious circle of hatred, and the choice she ultimately makes regarding Claudius's fate reframes the entire film as a deliberate inversion of Hamlet: where Shakespeare's play moves inexorably toward a stage littered with corpses, Scarlet begins with the bodies already dead and works its way toward the possibility of life and connection. The path to get there is undeniably chaotic, thematically overloaded, at times naïve, and structurally uneven, but its idealism is imbued with an honesty that is difficult to ignore. Ultimately, Scarlet feels like a minor Mamoru Hosoda in terms of narrative discipline, but its visual inventiveness, the wounded intensity of Mana Ashida's performance, and the sincerity with which it approaches forgiveness make it a work that lingers in the imagination more than its flaws would suggest.

Scarlet
Written and directed by Mamoru Hosoda
Story by Mamoru Hosoda
Produced by Nozomu Takahashi, Yuichiro Saito, Toshimi Tanio
Starring Mana Ashida, Masaki Okada, Koji Yakusho
Edited by Shigeru Nishiyama
Music by Taisei Iwasaki
Production company: Studio Chizu
Distributed by Toho, Sony Pictures Entertainment Japan
Release dates: September 4, 2025 (Venice), November 21, 2025 (Japan), February 13, 2026 (United States), March 11, 2026 (France)
Running time: 111 minutes

Seen on December 16, 2025 at Max Linder Panorama

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