Movie Review: In Scarlet, Hamlet is transplanted to an anime dream world

Japanese writer-director Mamoru Hosoda has made some amazing films that take deep dives into dream worlds. Hosoda’s “Mirai” (2018) is about a 4-year-old boy who resents his newborn sister. But in his backyard garden he meets his sister as a teenager. This is just the first of many domestic time travels, as the boy meets other family members from other points in their lives. A new understanding begins to dawn. In “Belle” (2022), a teenager who has lived through tragedy finds a soaring catharsis in a virtual realm. I thought it was one of the best movies of that year, and I still think it might be the best movie ever made over the Internet. Either way, its song-and-soul-blasting climax is unforgettable. Yet the director’s enviable scope in Hosoda’s latest, “Scarlet,” surpasses his understanding. In it, its female protagonist is a medieval princess who, after seeing her royal father killed by her uncle and dying herself, wakes up in a vast purgatory. In this strange afterlife, populated by the dead from all eras, she seeks revenge for her father. Anyone, I think, will grant that a Japanese anime transplanting “Hamlet” into a surreal underworld is a tad more ambitious than your average animated movie. Unlike the vast majority of cartoons, or even live-action movies, the problem with “Scarlet” is not a lack of imagination. It’s too much. Hosoda, a former Studio Ghibli animator whose other films include “Wolf Children” and “Summer Wars,” has an extraordinary knack for creating anime worlds of visual complexity while pursuing existential ideas with a childlike sincerity. But an excess of baroque design, of emotion, of scope, sinks Hosoda’s “Scarlet.” It’s the kind of misfire you can forgive. If you’re going to fail by overreaching, it might as well be with a wildly ambitious version of “Hamlet.” In the thrilling prologue, set in 16th-century Denmark, Scarlet (Ashida Mana) watches as her uncle Claudius (Kôji Yakusho) frames her father as a traitor and has him executed. Enraged, Scarlet – without any visit from her father’s ghost – goes to kill Claudius. Only he poisons her first, and Scarlet wakes up in what she learns is called the Otherlands. It is a kind of infinite wasteland, full of wandering souls and marauding bandits. People are there for a time, and then they pass into nothingness. A stairway to heaven is rumored to exist somewhere. While searching for Claudius, Scarlet is joined by a stranger she encounters named Hijiri (Okada Masaki). A modern-day paramedic, he spends most of his time in the Otherworld healing the wounds of others, including Scarlet’s enemies. “Scarlet” can be meandering and boring. Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up. If the Otherworld is laid out like Scarlet’s troubled conscience, the ensuing battle between revenge and forgiveness feels dully simplified. It is all a sea of ​​difficulties. Hosoda tries to build some interiority into the story (no small aspect of “Hamlet”) through Hijiri’s backstory, which telescopes Shakespeare’s problems to modern times. Hosoda grafted “Beauty and the Beast” into “Belle,” to sometimes awkward, sometimes enlightening effect. But in “Scarlet” he struggles to bridge “Hamlet” to today. It’s a big swing, the kind filmmakers as talented as Hosoda should take, but it doesn’t pay off. Yet it is often dazzling to look at and it is never dispassionate. Hosoda remains a director capable of tremulous, operatic heights. In “Scarlet,” for example, Claudius gets a spectacular death scene, a remarkable feat considering he’s already dead. “Scarlet,” a Sony Pictures Classics release, opens in limited release Friday and in wider theatrical release Feb. 6. Rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for violence/gore. Plays in both Japanese with subtitles and English dubbed versions. Running time: 112 minutes. Two stars out of four.