This movie comes 1st chronologically in the series. But of course, you've been gaslit into watching it 2nd for pointless overcomplication so you've already been spoiled on what happens after and this movie adds very little beyond overexplaining the generic backstory to what you already know these characters end up as.
The 1st 4 movies were pointlessly rearranged out of chronological order in the same way as the source material (thereafter is chronological). You'll find online (much like with any series) fanboys blindly recommend watching it in the order it was released. They will give no actual valid justification for this achronology however. So allow me: The author published each individual chapter online coming up with it as they went and ended up writing prequel chapters and sequel chapters and such off the cuff merely because that's the order they came up with it. Achronology adds absolutely nothing to these movies beyond the pointless achronology itself: pointless convolution of simple linear storytelling, not even adding timeline mystery as it literally tells you the dates for each movie and it's readily apparent which comes before which. What it does do is detract from the story: It shows the chronological last of the 4 1st, thus spoiling your experience of the 3 movies thereafter because all of them are murder-oriented, removing all suspense of whether or not the main cast will die when we now already know that they won't, they have plot armor to live because they need to be there for the later chronology. They made a lame story worse by recommending the release order. If you want to watch this in the release order, go ahead and watch the HP movies in a random order for the exact same result because achronology is just inherently better and aren't you special? (god I'm getting Vietnam flashbacks of Peach Boy Riverside)
The plot of this movie is a filler joke padding out a 1-note murder mystery antag and culminating in a big dumb action sequence ending with zero consequences. It isn't worth mentioning really. In fact none of the plots of any of the movies in this series are as they pretty much all follow this same formula.
Since this is a pointless movie, it stretches very little story of moving the main character duo setpieces into place as a great big nothingburger of 1hr crammed full of overindulgent directorial vomit and masturbatory filler and a joke of tropey character writing that is not only dumb and filler, but also incoherent.
Ultimately, they stick the landing with another dumb action climax for all those shonentypes to clap at. Genius. Get ready to wait several movies before you actually find out the laughably dumb and pointless excuse for plot that is deliberately skipped over at the end of this movie. Now that's just good wrighting.
Each movie in this series follows the main cast involved in another supernatural murder mystery scenario of the week for them to investigate/resolve via exposition dump nonmystery rather than piecing together evidence alongside the audience and often just completely removing all suspense by showing us the murderer and their circumstances from the start.
Both each movie internally and all the movies taken as a whole can be described as a dumb series of random asspulls strung together. Every aspect of it is making itself up as it goes:
For example, intrigue: Why is the killer making swastikas, ying-yangs, and sewing hands and feet swapped on victims? No reason really, plot point dropped forever from the series hereafter.
You can pretty much watch the author coming up with the characters in real-time from blank edgy cardboard nothings to suddenly dumping exposition backstories and that's about as far as they ever get.
Despite being ostensibly 'dark fantasy', while it deals with dark/mature themes this isn't horror, just 20% violence/gore between 80% filler. Rather than horror it's mature action, and whatever attempts it makes to be dark come across as laughably edgy, usually conveyed through idiotic shonen villain monologuing (think Angels of Death taking itself completely seriously).
The handling of themes of trauma/psychological issues is juvenile, tactless, and almost exclusively used for edgy schlock.
The dialogue is nearly 100% filler/exposition to string the audience along while pretending it has anything to say (cryptic nothings = mysterious = good wrighting) in addition to frequent poor translation/nonsense dialogue.
Barely any actual cinematography or even interesting shots. The best it manages is a bunch of superficial nothings like dead body with blood, oOoOo blood, spoOoOoky. But I guess this shallow filler counts as deep to some people.
The MC is a noncharacter simp with almost no backstory and hardly any relevance to the series. most everyone else actually goes out and does stuff while he kinda just shows up to talk and occasionally participate by simping for girls almost certainly because he's been written as a generic MC self-insert for a VN nonromance harem builder with all the hentai scenes left out. He's a pencil-pushing desk warmer the girls immediately fall for who has been written out of the story with dumb excuses like being comatose. Let alone making a different character MC, you know your story is bad when your MC of all people would've been better off cut from the entire series.
They frequently skip entire scenes that are actually part of the plot and just sort of act like they haven't, as if they were supposed to be there but were simply cut for pointless ambiguity because it apparently just isn't interested in telling the story, as if it is rushing through the plot in order to cram in as much cost-saving filler as it can. This series is a low effort unrevised draft.
1/10 (where 5/10 is average)
