'Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle' film review: Brutal fights powered by loss, regret & pain
The acclaimed manga series returns to the big screen with an action-packed, dramatic and tragic dark anime 'Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle' (in theaters starting Sept. 12).
In short: The Demon Slayer Corps are drawn into the Infinity Castle to face the Upper Rank demons in a desperate fight as the final battle against Muzan Kibutsuji begins. ('Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba' episodes are now available to stream on Crunchyroll)
'Infinity Castle' immediately fires out of the gate - and it's essentially two hours of back-to-back final battles. It has the energy of a final boss rush in a video game. But like the great serialized anime, the movie weaves compelling, complex character backstories into the fabric of each battle.
On paper 'Infinity Castle' is a string of intense battles against powerful demons. 'Infinity Castle' keeps the battles feeling fresh by pitting its human protagonists against enemies of differing flavors. One demon is polite to an unsettling degree as he rather graceously describes how he will devour humans. Another fight is defined by deep resentment and jealousy, infusing the battle with a personal vengance. While the tone and tenor of each battle varies, each fight does follow a familar template of a human trying to figure out the best fighting strategy to overcome their demonic opponent. Each fight seems insurmountable and mortal in consequence - so each scene steeps 'Infinity Castle' with unrelenting life-or-death stakes.
The benefit of a film like 'Infinity Castle' is fans get to witness epic battles on the largest scale without the inconvenience of waiting for the next episode. In similar anime series like 'Rurouni Kenshin' or even 'Dragon Ball Z,' these epic fights would take place over the course of many episodes, usually packed with a lot of filler. Packaging all these battles within one film like 'Infinity Castle' allows fans to experience climactic battles in one film - that said this movie's runtime clocks in at two and a half hours, so this movie isn't just a casual watch.
This climactic finale is well edited at the micro level, but slavishly segmented at the macro level. Even those entirely uninitiated with 'Demon Slayer' can grasp onto the character dynamics of the various members of the Demon Slayer Corps because the film quickly defines its heroes, its villains and the traumas that brought them to the Castle. Each of these battles is isolated in individual clashes between one of the heroes and their demon opponent, as if each battle is its own episode. This is a double-edged sword, wherein each segment of 'Infinity Castle' elegantly tells the story of deeply personal battles to the death - yet basically traps the audience in one specific chapter at any time. 'Infinity Castle' tells individual stories well, but fails to edit all the various moving parts together in a way that keeps the audience engaged with all the various characters and battles going on nearly simultaneously.
Note to any parents considering allow their children to watch this cinematic conclusion: 'Infinity Castle' earns its R rating. Humans and demons alike are butchered and dismembered with incredible violence. Children are killed. Victims are consumed. Although 'Demon Slayer' fans tend to be teens and young adults, parents should just be advised that 'Infinity Castle' features brutal, anime-stylized violence rife with spurting blood.
Final verdict: 'Infinity Castle' delivers on its promise of incredible fight sequences, but its patient, thorough and delicate storytelling is what makes this film special. Its riveting undercurrent of pain, regret and resentment adds layers of wrought emotional complexity to what could have been just a dull series of anime fights.
Score: 4/5
'Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle' opens in theaters nationwide starting Sept. 12. The action anime has a runtime of 155 minutes and is rated R for bloody violence throughout.
