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Ron: Welcome to another bonus Stereo Geeks episode from the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. I’m Ron, and today, I’m reviewing Scarlet.

Mon: Before we start our episode, we would like to acknowledge that the land we are recording on is the traditional territory of many nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples. It is now home to many diverse First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. We also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

Ron: While we are making this land acknowledgement, we understand that this is not enough and that positive action is required by the people of Canada to make substantive change for the Indigenous nations and communities whose lands we now reside on.

Ron: Scarlet, princess of Elsinore in Denmark, daughter of the beloved king Amleth, wants to make the world a beautiful place. But when her father is wrongfully executed for treason by his brother, Claudius, all the good disappears from Scarlet’s world. 

Soon after, Scarlet is sent abroad to study and she spends that time honing her skills with knives and swords. But given the opportunity to return to Elsinore and exact revenge against Claudius, Scarlet fails and is poisoned.

And then Scarlet finds herself in the afterlife, called the Otherworld. She still has a chance to exact revenge but it’s a long, treacherous path to the now-dead Claudius, and his goons are lurking everywhere.

On her quest, Scarlet teams up with Hijiri, a nurse from the present. Hijiri is what Scarlet calls a “do-gooder”. He doesn’t believe in killing; he is a nurse after all. But despite Scarlet’s violent ways, Hijiri stays by her side. Mainly because she really needs medical attention. 

Ron: It was a fascinating experience watching Scarlet right after I watched Eternity and Hamlet at TIFF25. Reviews for those films will be on FlickSided soon. 

Aside from the fact that Scarlet is also based on Hamlet, it’s also about the afterlife, like Eternity was. I feel like I watched an unexpected trifecta of films about death and grief and afterlives. But they’re all unique experiences, existing in their own particular worlds. 

The afterlife in Scarlet is so wildly different from the hotel setting of Eternity. And its take on grief and revenge, it’s not as realistic as in Hamlet, it’s quite fantastical and medieval, which makes sense in the setting that Scarlet is coming from. It was a complete coincidence that I got to see these three films back to back, but I am glad I did. I came away with a very interesting perspective on these films. 

Ron: So let me get into what I liked about this film. First up, the Otherworld is a horrible place but wow, I couldn’t stop looking at it. It’s basically a barren desert, with nary a drop of water in sight. And the water that is available should be treated with the greatest suspicion. 

The skies are like oceans here and beyond the clouds lurks a monster of truly epic proportions. We see the shadow at times and when the monster gets really angry, it comes right out of those watery skies and displays its wrath. You have to watch this film on the big screen to feel the sheer power of that creature. It’s never explained what it is, but if you think of the Otherworld as a kind of purgatory, then it’s the keeper of the place. 

There’s a fascinating undercurrent to Otherworld in Scarlet. The inequities that Claudius perpetrated in real life persist in Otherworld—he gets to decide who spends their afterlife in eternity or not. Basically he gets to be king in both realms. What an interesting way to examine the corruption that comes with absolute power.

Of course, the primary story is about Scarlet’s revenge. And that gives the film the opportunity to become a kind of road-trip movie, without the car, of course. Scarlet and Hijiri meet other downtrodden folk in the Otherworld. Most of them bemoaning the fact that their lives are just as difficult here as it was in the real world. 

Though Scarlet has a mission, Hijiri can’t stop himself from helping people. And as such, the two end up joining a community of people who need medical attention. I loved this part of the film. It’s in the second act, where the ‘fun and games’ of films happen. And it truly is fun and games. Despite the community’s general sense of distrust, Hijiri is an instant hit with his medical knowledge and gentle personality. 

Scarlet takes time to warm to people—she didn’t have anyone to trust in real life, and that fear won’t leave her in the Otherworld. But eventually, the kindly group of old-timers win her over too. Scarlet’s life was “full of regrets,” she insists. With these people and Hijiri, she finally begins to see other ways to live. If that isn’t a wonderful message, what is?

Scarlet is also a stunningly beautiful film. Animation is rarely bad but I feel like we’ve got used to amazing animation these days. To the point where we don’t realise how mesmerizing the art is. It’s undeniable that Scarlet is pure artistry. There were interiors that looked so realistic, that, had the anime characters not been in the scene, I would have thought it was live-action. The attention to detail, for all the costumes, the palace interiors, the drudgery of the Otherworld—how much work must have gone into this film. Every character also looks different. There are thousands of little faces that appear in the background and in the crowd scenes, and nobody looks copy-pasted. The amount of work that went into this is something else.

There are two scenes that made me very happy. I’ll avoid spoilers but they both have to do with music and dance. Scarlet is a dark film—it’s about betrayal and revenge. Levity is hard to come by. So these scenes where Scarlet and Hijiri get to let down their hair and enjoy people and life, or the afterlife, are a breath of fresh air. Also, it is hard to animate dance. Any movement in animation seems like a ton of work, but the grace and speed of dancing must be particularly challenging. To make it look seamless and realistic, while following the beat of the music? Hats off to animators everywhere. 

Ron: I definitely liked the concept of Scarlet. I loved this reimagining of Hamlet as anime. This film really only uses the crux of the Hamlet story—the rest of it is from the imagination of director Mamoru Hosoda. And that’s what I want to see four centuries after Shakespeare wrote the play. 

Having said that, the pacing felt a bit off to me. I don’t know whether it’s because I saw the Riz Ahmed Hamlet the night before, and that was positively frenetic. But this film started off at a quick pace and then slowed down near the end. At the most crucial breaking point of the film, the pacing felt too slow.

I don’t often feel the length of films. A yardstick of mine is that if a film feels long, then it’s not keeping me engaged. This film felt long, much longer than an hour and 51 minutes. At one point, I found myself checking my watch, thinking the film was coming to an end. Only to see there were 30 minutes left. For comparison, I saw The Captive at TIFF25 which was over two and a half hours, and it sped by. So much happened and it was well-paced.

I also didn’t completely understand where one of the scenes in the film came from. It didn’t fit with the rules of Otherworld that we had been privy to. It was a great scene, sure, but logically, how did it happen? There was no precedent for that magical moment. I wanted to go with the flow of things, but it did take me out of the story.

And my last point wasn’t the movie’s fault, but the sound was too loud in my theatre. I had to cover my ears a few times when the music rose or someone screamed. What was that about?

Ron: Pacing issues aside, I enjoyed watching Scarlet. So much imagination, and a completely unexpected adaptation of Hamlet. The animation is gorgeous and so realistic. The characters are all believable, and some of them are quite lovable, as well. The film ponders life’s inequities and questions humanity’s lust for war, while also being a road trip film about revenge. It’s the complete package, in my books. 

Stay tuned for more reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival 2025.