‘Scarlet’ movie review: Mamoru Hosoda gives ‘Hamlet’ a stunning, maximalist afterlife with little to live in

Cinema has returned to Hamlet repeatedly this year. A machinima documentary stages the text inside the videogame physics of GTA V, tested how Shakespeare’s language behaves within the absurdity of Los Santos in Grand Theft Hamlet. Meanwhile, Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated Hamnet redirects attention away from the Danish court toward the private grief that preceded the play’s composition through Maggie O’Farrell’s eponymous novel. Even Riz Ahmed has taken a turn at the play, anchoring a contemporary screen adaptation that relocates familial betrayal within a modern South Asian business dynasty. Anime filmmaker Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet enters this crowded field by absorbing the play’s revenge mechanics into a fantasy cosmology. It arrives with the weight of expectation that now trails every new Studio Chizu project, partly because of Hosoda’s stature as one of contemporary animation’s defining auteurs and partly because of the sheer ambition signaled by a four-and-a-half-year production cycle and an explicit dialogue with Shakespeare.

Hosoda opens Scarlet with an extended audiovisual stunner. A famished, pink-haired figure moves across a blasted deserted plain layered with discarded armor, each piece rusted into the ground as magma advances in slow, deliberate seams beneath her feet. Above her stretches a sky composed of a suspended ocean, its vast waters sweeping overhead in heavy currents while stars glimmer beyond the surface like distant bioluminescence.

Cutting through this inverted sea is a dragon of overwhelming, almost geological scale, its elongated neck and trailing tail extending beyond the frame, its wingspan so vast that it seems to displace the sky itself as it moves. Millions of weapons are embedded across its body—swords, spears, axes, relics from every era—turning its hide into a drifting armory that records centuries of failed resistance. Lightning discharges along its passage as a secondary effect. The image carries the density of a long-promised Silmarillion myth finally rendered, recalling the sheer dimensional terror of Ancalagon the Black, Tolkien’s legendary sky-filling dragon whose scale was defined less by description than by the devastation required to bring it down.

For several minutes the film feels bracingly unburdened by explanation or thesis and establishes Hosoda’s guiding interest in thresholds, between life and death/ past and future. The narrative that follows is more classical in its scaffolding. Set initially in a mythicised late-sixteenth-century Denmark, the film introduces Princess Scarlet, voiced with steely resolve by Mana Ashida, as the adored daughter of King Amleth, a ruler committed to compromise over conquest. His brother Claudius, performed by Kōji Yakusho with oily composure, engineers Amleth’s execution through political subterfuge and consolidates power through fear. Scarlet witnesses the spectacle of her father’s death, swears vengeance, and is swiftly poisoned herself, which sends her into the aforementioned hellscape of the Otherlands, a purgatorial realm populated by the dispossessed dead from across eras and cultures. Once she learns that Claudius has also taken refuge there, she sets out across its shifting terrain with the explicit aim of finding him and finishing what was interrupted in life.

A still from ‘Scarlet’
| Photo Credit:
TOHO

The Otherlands is where Scarlet briefly regains its footing as something strange and genuinely curious. Hosoda’s much-publicised hybrid digital approach yields environments that feel overworked in the best sense, scarred by prior occupants and burdened with history. Rejecting traditional 2D character animation and avoiding Hollywood-style CG, Hosoda and Studio Chizu pursue an amalgamated aesthetic that privileges facial micro-expression and environmental density. Characters move with a certain stiffness in their bodies, yet their faces register emotion with unusual granularity, while the landscapes around them stretch into deserts, quarries, storm-wracked plains, and rocky expanses that feel oppressively realistic.

Scarlet’s journey through this space introduces her to Hijiri, a modern-day Japanese paramedic voiced by Masaki Okada, whose disbelief at his own death grounds the film’s philosophical tension. Hijiri’s ethic centers on care, patience, and collective survival, and his presence forces Scarlet’s single-minded pursuit of revenge into constant friction with alternative modes of action. That tension briefly loosens during a spontaneous dance interlude, staged as Scarlet glimpses the future, where bodies move in open synchrony reminiscent of La La Land’s “Another Day of Sun,” while her vision slips across eras and star fields in a wordless passage that echoes the cosmic drift of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their dynamic supplies the film’s clearest emotional throughline, especially as Hijiri challenges Scarlet’s reliance on force while acknowledging the realities of being hunted by Claudius’s soldiers.

The film’s ambitions briefly widen as Scarlet begins to recognise her influence within the Otherlands, where inequality mirrors the hierarchies of the living world and charismatic tyrants exploit hope as currency. Hosoda structures this realm as a mirror economy, where proximity to power determines access to safety, food, and eventual passage to the ‘Infinite Lands’, while the majority linger in provisional camps built from scavenged armor and collapsed architecture. 

Claudius exploits this arrangement with precision, promising collective ascension in exchange for military loyalty, which allows him to reproduce his earthly coup inside the afterlife itself. Scarlet’s symbolic weight emerges from her visibility, since her battles against Claudius’s forces circulate as rumour among the displaced dead. She listens to grievances and witnesses deprivation, yet her forward motion remains tethered to a single objective. Hosoda frames this as a moral problem, which leaves Scarlet’s influence suspended between revolutionary potential and narrative inertia.

A still from ‘Scarlet’
| Photo Credit:
TOHO

Hosoda also gestures toward systemic critique, toward cycles of violence perpetuated through myth and inheritance, and toward the ethical limits of forgiveness. These gestures remain broad, and the film’s political imagination stops short of turning observation into consequence, hesitating to let these elements transform Scarlet’s choices in materially distinct ways.

The inertia sharpens once the story pivots back toward Claudius and the mechanics of revenge inherited from Hamlet. Hosoda abandons the early formal looseness of the Otherlands in favour of increasingly linear progression, with Scarlet advancing through successive confrontations that echo the logic of videogame boss battles. This shift parallels Hosoda’s adaptation strategy, which borrows Shakespeare’s architecture of deferred confrontation while discarding the play’s interior conflict as an engine of delay. The movement culminates in a climactic sequence set along a luminous stairway leading toward the Infinite Lands, where sparkling steps stretch upward through open air, as Scarlet ascends in slow procession, and Hosoda’s animation turns light, fabric, and motion into a fragile, ethereal spectacle.

Scarlet remains compelling precisely because its reach exceeds its grasp. Hosoda’s commitment to treating animation as a space for adult moral inquiry persists even when the answers are softened by generality. It may never fully reconcile its Shakespearean inheritance with its pacifist yearning, yet it sustains a restless intelligence about why those stories continue to matter, and why revisiting them remains an unfinished task.

Scarlet is currently running in theatres

Published – February 06, 2026 03:58 pm IST