‘Scarlet’ review: Japan's Mamoru Hosoda borrows from ‘Hamlet’ for striking animated tale of revenge

Dir/scr: Mamoru Hosoda. Japan. 2025. 111mins

Freely adapting Hamlet to tell a fantastical story of revenge, forgiveness and the afterworld, Scarlet boasts one arresting visual after another. Acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Hosoda follows a determined princess as she plots to kill her uncle, who put to death her kindly father, the king. After she herself is murdered, her journey takes her to a strange purgatory, which gives Hosoda the opportunity to create several strikingly surreal environments. But what makes this adult animation so affecting is the writer-director’s commitment to fortifying his spectacle with a deep emotional undercurrent.

Conjures up evocative worlds and intensely emotional set pieces

After screening in Venice and Toronto, the film opened in Japan on November 21 and has grossed approximately $1.3 million to date. Scarlet plays on IMAX screens in US theatres from December 12 – the same date it opens in the UK before rolling out across early 2026 – and the large-format option will accentuate the picture’s stunning images. Hosoda’s 2018 film Mirai received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and Scarlet could similarly court awards attention, thanks in part to voters’ familiarity with the Shakespeare classic that serves as its inspiration.

Hosoda initially sets the action in Denmark at the end of the 16th century, where Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida) adores her father, King Amleth, who preaches the importance of reaching compromise with enemies rather than going to war. But Amleth’s conniving brother Claudius (Koji Yakusho) convinces the kingdom that Amleth is actually a traitor, leading the king to be executed. Incensed, Scarlet vows vengeance, but is then poisoned by Claudius; sent to The Otherworld, she hopes to find her dead father — and, later, slay Claudius, who has found himself in this purgatory, too.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare’s protagonist wrestled with the responsibility of avenging his royal father. Hosoda borrows the Bard’s Danish setting and aspects of the play’s palace intrigue — not to mention a couple of choice lines of dialogue — but Scarlet quickly establishes its own narrative, starting with the fact that the main character is a driven, vengeful princess. Quickly, we enter The Otherworld, which Scarlet learns is depressingly similar to the mortal world in that the well-off have it better than the commoners. Hosoda populates this purgatory with dazzling shots of monstrous storms and majestic dragons, making the afterlife feel like both a dream and a nightmare.

Soon, Scarlet meets Hijiri (Masaki Okada), a medic from the present day who insists there must be some mistake — he cannot possibly be dead. Slowly, the two form a bond as Hijiri accompanies the bloodthirsty Scarlet on her quest to hunt down Claudius, which requires her battling large battalions of his troops. Similar to Amleth, Hijiri believes in peace and love, and much of Scarlet involves him and Scarlet debating their differing worldviews. Hosoda is not especially subtle when laying out his pacifist message but, while his film argues that revenge solves nothing, the writer-director nonetheless delivers a series of quite effective action sequences.

The character animation is fairly straightforward, with Scarlet and Hijiri’s body movements a little stiff. But as he demonstrated in his most recent picture, the 2021 Cannes entry Belle, Hosoda is marvellous at conjuring up evocative worlds and intensely emotional set pieces. Occasionally, The Otherworld resembles a blazing desert or an eerie lunar landscape as Scarlet starts to grasp the disturbing rules of the afterlife. (If someone is killed in The Otherworld, he suffers a fate worse than death, dissolving into dust and entering the frightening realm of “nothinginess.”) Scarlet successfully veers far afield from Hamlet, but the film retains the play’s grim fascination with death and power, which comes to a head in a shocking face-off between the princess and her murderous uncle.

This is hardly the first film about a grieving protagonist in search of vengeance — predictably, Scarlet will ultimately learn tough lessons about the limits of violence. But Scarlet pushes past those tropes to render a vivid vision of an afterlife filled with the unhappy and regretful dead, including Claudius. And Hosoda also sneaks in a sweet friendship between Scarlet and Hijiri, highlighted by an unexpected but joyous dance sequence. These two may be from different time periods and see life from opposing perspectives, but eventually they’ll find their rhythm.