Jujutsu Kaisen 0 (2021)

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 arrives as a prequel feature, adapting a single manga volume into a brisk stretch of curses, school corridors, and adolescent grief. Yuta Okkotsu is a nervous boy haunted by the spirit of a childhood friend who refuses to leave him alone, and the film treats this as tragedy, not as a condition to be diagnosed. The animation is handsome. The fights are loud. The emotional register is sincere, and sincerity is not the same thing as a thesis.

The supporting cast offers Maki Zen'in, a young woman who fights well and whose clan has cast her out, and the film lets this sit as backstory instead of argument. The screenplay gestures at sorcerer society's caste hierarchy and royal bloodlines, though the gesture belongs to world-building, not to contemporary social commentary. The voice cast is Japanese, drawn from the usual deep bench of the industry, and nobody appears to have been assembled for the purpose of a press release. Geto's villainy is a sorcerer-supremacist project about culling ordinary people, which is monstrous but not economic. There is no environmental sermon. There is no body-diverse messaging. There is no queer subtext, unless we count a panda, and we do not.

The film's themes are loneliness and friendship, and it delivers them through punches and silences instead of speeches. Yuta's anxiety reads as grief, which is a distinct thing from a clinical identity, and the movie never stops to explain itself to the audience. This is a picture made for teenagers who want to watch teenagers hit things, and it respects that contract. We are left, as so often, with a competent genre exercise that has no interest in the culture war and no idea it is being graded on it. Refreshing, in a modest way. The score reflects a film that simply declines to participate.