Dustin Roberts
Uzumaki ends with a terrifyingly apocalyptic finale that doesn’t quite undo the weaknesses of the series post-Episode 1. While the series overall has struggled with pacing issues, Episode 4 is focused and tight, rarely feeling rushed or overpacked with plotlines. The result is a wonderful cosmic horror ending that ratchets everything up as far as possible—and then breaks the world. It’s bleak as hell and thrilling.
Episode 4 is essentially a post-apocalypse narrative. The town is destroyed roving gangs of teenagers have learned to harness the power of tornadoes to fly around and cause havoc. The laws of physics have shifted, such that any gesture made with speed of force can create dangerous tornados and whirlwinds. Reality has all but broken in Kurouzu-cho now that the Typhoons have ended. Once again, the theme of young people living without proper guidance from the previous generation acts as a catalyst for the horrors of the story. These increasingly psychotic teenagers are genuinely frightening, and it’s much too late for any authority figure to try to stop them as they murder with impunity and destroy most of the buildings that still stand after the typhoons.
The only buildings that haven’t been demolished are some ancient row houses that seem immune to the damage that destroyed everything else. As a result, everyone in town has crammed themselves into these houses that are much too small to fit everyone, so Kirie, her brother Mitsuo, Shuichi, and a newcomer named Chie are forced to fend for themselves. On top of that, more and more people are turning into snail people, which many of the survivors have started to cannibalistically eat as a source of meat. All of this adds to the strong sense of despair—Kirie and her crew cannot leave the town because every path leads back to the town (a la The Blair Witch Project), and the only shelters are literally packed to the rafters with survivors, and roving gangs are increasingly dangerous as they develop a strong taste for human snail meat. To top everything off, Kirie’s brother, Mitsuo, has formed the beginnings of a spiral shell on his back, indicating his inevitable transition into a snail.
I won’t say more about where the story takes us, other than to say that it is a haunting and beautiful climax. When I originally read the manga, I couldn’t imagine how this story would end, and when I saw where it was going, with its almost reverse cosmic horror ending, I was thrilled—it’s an ending that still haunts me to this day. I don’t think this episode nails it as perfectly as I would have liked, but it does a good enough job of approximating that feeling.
Overall, this whole series was inconsistent on almost every level. From the animation to the story pacing, some episodes and segments were vastly better than others. Still, the integrity of Ito’s masterpiece remains, I think, as I found the horror (and, in at least one episode, the humor) of his original work intact and thrillingly effective.
