Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997)

Twenty-six years on from its release, this remains the most punitive act of closure ever committed to celluloid, a film that exists because the television finale refused to explain itself and the audience would not let the matter rest. Anno, freshly recovered from a period in which strangers debated the best method of killing him, responded by dissolving the human race into orange fluid and calling it a conclusion. The concerns on display are metaphysical, theological, and psychological. There is no interest whatsoever in the social questions that occupy the contemporary cultural conversation, and the film makes no apology for that.

Where the film does brush against modern sensibilities, it does so obliquely. Shinji's depression and Asuka's trauma are treated with a seriousness that predates the current vocabulary for such things, and the climactic vision invokes Kaworu, lending the finale a genuine queer undercurrent that the film declines to foreground. Women hold command posts throughout NERV, though the film's treatment of Asuka, comatose and exposed, complicates any claim of feminist sympathy. On race, ecology, economics, and bodily affirmation, the record is blank. The apocalypse here is supernatural in origin and personal in meaning.

The closing argument, that life contains pain and is nonetheless worth continuing, lands with a faint instructional thump, the only moment the film stops being oblique and starts telling us something. Everything else is abstraction, religious imagery deployed without a decoder ring, and a great deal of screaming. We have sat through many sermons dressed as entertainment. This is not one of them. It is a funeral, as its makers intended, and funerals rarely lecture the mourners. A difficult vintage. Devastating, unfashionable, and almost entirely free of the cultural agendas we are contractually obliged to inventory.