Scarlet (2025) Review - Mamoru Hosoda’s Most Visually Ambitious Film Yet
Across films like Summer Wars, The Boy and the Beast, and Belle, Mamoru Hosoda has returned repeatedly to ideas of connection – between parents and children, between individuals and the worlds they inhabit, and between isolation and belonging. His latest film, Scarlet, continues that exploration, though in a form that is darker, more severe, and, at times, more uncertain than anything he has made before.
It is, on its surface, an unlikely project: an animated reimagining of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, filtered through Hosoda’s recurring fascination with dual worlds and emotional transformation. Yet what emerges is not a straightforward adaptation, but something more impressionistic – a meditation on revenge, grief, and the possibility, however distant, of forgiveness.
The story centers on Scarlet, a young Danish princess whose life is shattered by the murder of her father, King Amleth, at the hands of her uncle Claudius. The bones of the original tragedy remain intact: betrayal, usurpation, a restless desire for vengeance. But Hosoda shifts the perspective in a way that feels both natural and quietly radical. Scarlet is not a prince paralyzed by indecision; she is a force propelled by it. Where Hamlet hesitates, Scarlet acts.
That difference defines the film. Scarlet does not question whether revenge is justified. She assumes it is. Her journey is not one of deliberation, but of pursuit – an almost singular drive to find and destroy the man who took everything from her. In another film, this might be framed as empowerment. Here, it is something closer to obsession.
Hosoda does not romanticize that obsession. Instead, he asks what such a path costs, and that question becomes literal when Scarlet is poisoned and awakens in what the film calls the Otherworld – a vast, desolate afterlife where the dead gather, struggle, and, if they fall again, disappear entirely. It is a place governed by its own logic, at once fantastical and strangely familiar. There are communities, conflicts, and alliances. There is suffering. There is hope, though it is often difficult to see.
In this sense, the Otherworld is less a departure from reality than a reflection of it. Like much of Hosoda’s work, it exists on a parallel plane, not to escape the human experience, but to distill it.
Here, Scarlet encounters Hijiri, a paramedic from the modern world who refuses to accept his own death, and their pairing ultimately forms the emotional and philosophical center of the film. Scarlet moves through the world with singular clarity of purpose, while Hijiri moves through it driven by compassion.
He heals those who would harm him and refuses to abandon even the most undeserving. To Scarlet, this is incomprehensible.
Their dynamic is not built on agreement, but on friction. Scarlet sees mercy as weakness. Hijiri sees it as necessity. Between them, Hosoda stages a debate that feels less like a narrative device and more like a genuine struggle to reconcile two fundamentally different ways of existing in the world.
It is here that Scarlet begins to reveal its deeper intentions. This is not a story about whether revenge is justified. It is about whether it solves anything.
Scarlet’s encounters throughout the Otherworld reinforce this tension. She fights her way through Claudius’ followers with a ferocity that is both exhilarating and unsettling. These sequences are staged with a visceral intensity that marks a departure from the gentler emotional rhythms of Hosoda’s earlier films. The violence here is not stylized to the point of abstraction, but carries weight and consequence.
And yet, after each confrontation, Hijiri lingers – tending to the wounded, refusing to let the cycle continue without interruption. It is a small gesture, repeated often enough to take on significance.
Visually, Scarlet is perhaps Hosoda’s most ambitious work to date. The film divides itself between two distinct aesthetic approaches: the historical world of Scarlet’s life, rendered in a style reminiscent of traditional hand-drawn animation, and the Otherworld, gorgeously realized through digital imagery.
The contrast is initially jarring. The eye struggles to reconcile the tactile warmth of one with the hyper-detailed precision of the other. But as the film progresses, the division begins to feel intentional – less a stylistic experiment than a thematic one. The past, for all its tragedy, is grounded, tangible. The afterlife is vast, uncertain, and, at times, alienating.
There are moments of striking beauty, such as a dragon gliding across an endless horizon, but they are tempered by a sense of desolation. This is not an afterlife of comfort. It is a continuation of struggle.
When Scarlet finally confronts Claudius, the moment carries the weight of everything that has come before. It is staged with the emotional gravity one expects from such a culmination. It is, in a sense, the film’s most vulnerable choice.
Hosoda is asking the audience to accept an idea that may, in practice, feel unattainable: that compassion can extend even to those who have shown none. That healing can begin not with justice, but with understanding. In another context, this might feel naïve, but here, it feels sincere.
Scarlet does not argue that forgiveness is easy, or even always appropriate. It suggests only that it is worth considering, and that the alternative, an endless cycle of violence and retribution, offers little in the way of resolution.
Whether one agrees with that conclusion is almost beside the point. What matters is that the film is willing to ask the question.
Scarlet carries forward Hosoda’s fascination with connection, with the bonds that define us. But it does so through a lens that is harsher than in his previous work, more uncertain, and, at times, more conflicted. It is a film that seems aware of the limits of its own optimism, even as it reaches for it. It remains, unmistakably, the work of a filmmaker who believes in the possibility of something more, and in a time when that belief can feel increasingly difficult to hold onto, there is something powerful about a film that insists on it anyway.
Scarlet is not necessarily a perfect film, but it is undoubtedly a thoughtful, challenging, and beautiful one that anyone who appreciates animation should make a point of seeing.