Venice: "Scarlet" is an ambitious misstep

Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice

With Scarlet, Mamoru Hosoda takes his boldest swing yet, and lands his weakest film. Even compared with his early commercial outings (Digimon, One Piece), this latest work is a misfire: ambitious in scope, but undone by confused storytelling and uneven execution. The premise fuses Shakespeare and isekai. The film opens in 16th-century Denmark, where Scarlet, daughter of a murdered king, vows revenge against her uncle Claudius, who has seized the throne. Before she can act, Claudius poisons her, and the story pivots into the logic of isekai: Scarlet awakens in a strange afterlife populated by dragons and people from different eras, suspended in time. Death here is permanent, raising the stakes but also exposing how little sense the world makes...

Scarlet soon meets Hijiri, a paramedic from modern Japan who can’t recall how he arrived. Their personalities clash (she volatile and violent, he calm and altruistic) yet they form the film’s emotional axis. Unfortunately, their relationship develops in fits and starts, repeatedly derailed by inconsistent world-building and narrative dead ends. Claudius and his henchmen also appear, intent on monopolizing eternity, though the mechanics of this realm remain so opaque that their motivations feel arbitrary.

Hosoda tries to frame Scarlet’s journey as one of healing: revenge will not ease her trauma, and compassion must replace rage. But this arc is handled clumsily. At one point, Scarlet inexplicably dreams herself into a Japanese La La Land sequence, dancing joyfully with Hijiri through colorful streets. She awakens, cuts her hair, and renounces vengeance: an emotional pivot that feels unearned, more costume change than revelation.

The film’s problems pile up. Hosoda’s familiar themes—time collisions, relationships evolving in unexpected directions—surface only in distorted form, while the overwrought melodrama grates. Scarlet spends much of the film screaming or sobbing, her fury building toward outcomes that carry little weight. The final anti-war message is not objectionable in itself but embarrassingly naïve in execution, suggesting today’s world is a war-free utopia and that justice depends on enlightened monarchy; an astonishingly tone-deaf premise in the current climate.

Even the animation falters. Large-scale crowd sequences, with thousands of independently moving figures, are technically impressive, but character animation often looks stiff and robotic. Facial expressions slip into uncanny valley territory, particularly in the dreamlike dance scene, where experiments with fluid movement only highlight the awkwardness. The contrast between these sequences and the more traditional animation is jarring.

In the end, Scarlet mistakes ambition for depth. It throws Shakespeare, isekai, melodrama, and grand anti-war statements into a single pot, only to produce a muddled, incoherent mix. Bloated at over two hours, violent and overwrought at its climaxes, and hampered by uneven visuals, it fails to make us care about its heroine’s tragedy. For a director who has given us works as resonant as Wolf Children, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Belle, and Mirai, this film is not just a disappointment: it’s a serious misstep.

Previously at Venice

Comments

[Cláudio Alves]

Heavens, this fall festival season is positively littered with Hamlets!