Chainsaw Man Episode 6 Review: Shows Us The Horror Side Of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Work
Cast: Kikunosuke Toya, Shiori Izawa, Tomori Kusunoki
Director: Hiroshi Seko
Streaming Platform: Crunchyroll
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
When while watching the fifth episode of Chainsaw Man we felt a certain propensity towards the mixture of genres, we still wrote about work with a typical horror concept but almost entirely lent to shonen action with comedy and slice-of-life parentheses. To learn more, read the review of Chainsaw Man Episode 5. The sixth episode of the Studio MAPPA anime remembers its own spectral and diabolical premises and builds twenty minutes of absolute quality, definitively awakening the dormant horror and deducing an episode that works great even independently precisely because it is unique in this first part of the season.
Episode 6 begins where we left off, with our Devil Hunters trapped in a time loop by the Eternity Devil, a creepy-looking devil with many faces and voices, which Studio Mappa has animated to stunning effect. This means they are stuck on the same floor as a hotel, potentially left to starve. However, the devil who did this says they can all leave, on one condition: that they feed them Denji, the Chainsaw Man himself. This feeling of being stuck in time is successfully conveyed, considering that the episode has only 20 minutes to explore its scope, during which we see the characters sleep, eat, smoke and interact with each other in both ridiculous and more serious ways, while considering the fact that they could very well die.
Chainsaw Man Episode 6 Review: The Story
The episode opens with the group formed by the Hayakawa team (including Denji and Power) and colleagues led by Himeno (with Arai and Kobeni) trapped in what appears to be a hotel with no way out, a real dead end. The Spatio-temporal laws of the 8th floor of the building where our devil hunters entered to hunt down a target have been subverted by a devil. Going down or up the stairs, the devil hunters always return to the same point, looking from the windows they seem to see other rooms: it’s a vicious circle and there’s no way to get out of it. The group suffers a psychological backlash (Kobeni and Arai the most destabilized), begins to give way under the blows of fear, and is close to losing hope of solving an unsolvable puzzle.
When everyone, except Aki (who scans the floor with determination), seems resigned and powerless, the devil responsible for the time block that afflicts the eighth floor shows himself in all his horrifying deformity and offers the devil hunters a chance, a pact: Denji’s death in exchange for freedom. What turns out to be the Devil Eternity, who grows and feeds on the fear of the victims, puts the group in a corner and when everyone now seems willing to sacrifice Denji to get out of that labyrinth (except, once again, Aki, ready to unsheathing his katana with devastating effects), the chainsaw-boy intervenes personally to give his companions a chance, throwing himself straight into the infinite jaws of the devil.
The use of a structure and the presence of typical horror elements in the sixth episode of Chainsaw Man is evident right from the presentation of its synopsis. The episode, all set within the only narrow space of a dull hotel, establishes its own rules distancing itself from what has been seen so far thanks to the unprecedented possibilities that the new single and singular “dimension” reached by the protagonists allows us to explore. “Kill Denji”, which is the title of the new release, crosses the horror mice of cursed hotels and haunted houses, stages characters who do not have the power to cross the place in which they are trapped, and victims agents within an impassable space.
It is the sublime horror of the infinite that the devil hunters find themselves experiencing, in a place that is both non-places, boundless and confined at the same time, a dead end for individuals with different conventions and coordinates, space from the specularity that suffocates. In short, the latest iteration of Chainsaw Man is a horror to the core, it is in the oppressive setting in which the characters are forced, into the most terrifying and gruesome incarnation of the evil that persecutes the protagonists so far, in the construction of the narration that gradually becomes more anxious, which leads to the race against time from the extreme stakes, in the escape from death and the psychological imbalance of the victim-characters.
It is still so in the reactions which are not only disproportionate in the moment of greatest tension but extremely differentiated during the first approach to the problem: it is interesting to witness the different elaboration of the situation by the members of the group, increasingly split and uneven in the face of the fear. With a Denji who doesn’t deny himself in showing off his naive idiocy, a Power who does not look bad in the face of the absurd behavior of the protagonist, rediscovering himself as a Nobel Prize winner amid the emergency (the two still fuel the comic portion of the episode), an Aki who is always on point and extremely determined in an attempt to unravel the skein, and the more “human” Kobeni and Arai on the verge of delirium (let’s find out more about the girl’s character and motivations), “Kill Denji” turns out to be horror even in the typical dispersion of the group that runs into the terrifying complication.
Chainsaw Man Episode 6 Review and Analysis
It even exudes it from the shots and “camera” movements, flaunting a very skillful direction in producing growing suspense, amplifying the sense of mystery, giving life to expedients that once again manifest a declared cinematic influence, indulging the whim of constructing exquisite compositions with the illusion of the wide angle, close-ups that linger on the exaggerated expressions of the characters (as in the case of a distraught Kobeni), details of the eyes that are a visual leitmotif of this series and that more than before acquire meaning in investigating the emotions of the protagonists, illuminating subjective shots (as well as the first person shot of Kobeni pointing the knife at Denji) and refined perspectives from the hinted symbolism but recurring.
Also effective is the choice of suddenly overturning the entire floor in a scene that closely resembles the fight without gravity in the corridor of Inception and which allows the subsequent and final move by Denji who, in free fall towards the mouth of the Devil Eternity, reproduces a symbolic descent into hell. In short, a perfect direction both in channeling the chaos released in a circumscribed environment such as the anomalous eighth floor and in the narration of the relaxed flashback concerning Himeno and Aki, impeccable in enhancing the idea of a claustrophobic space, in restricting it by filling it with figures.
Insisting on the quality of the animations then seems, halfway through, redundant, and still, it would be to continue to praise the avant-garde management of the lights (the dinner scene of the Himeno-Aki couple is truly splendid in this sense). With Denji in mid-air, launched into a desperate attack, all that remains is to wait for a seventh episode that could abandon the horror atmospheres just tested to make room for the destructive fury of the Chainsaw Man.
Chainsaw Man Episode 6 was a fun mix of horror and comedy, striking an enjoyable balance that other shows struggle to achieve. While there were a lot of funny moments, there were also some really scary and startling scenes as well as a fair amount of character development. There may not have been much action this week, but it looks like things are set to improve next week. Perhaps the only gripe is the cliffhanger, which left me feeling like the episode ended too soon, just when things were about to get even more interesting.
Chainsaw Man Episode 6 Review: The Last Words
With the sixth episode, Chainsaw Man rediscovers his vocation for horror, giving life to a jewel that also works on its own and which surpasses itself in giving us a direction inspired and reinvigorated by the “change” of the genre, always fitting in the management of a single setting and in heightening the suspense and deepening the sense of mystery.
