There are animated films that are visually beautiful, and then there is Mononoke. Watching this trilogy has increasingly felt less like watching conventional animation and more like being trapped inside an extremely elaborate Japanese woodblock print that has developed a personal grudge against me. The Curse of the Serpent is the final chapter of the three-film Mononoke project, following The Phantom in the Rain and The Ashes of Rage. All three films return to the Ōoku, but each shifts its attention toward women occupying increasingly higher positions within its rigid hierarchy. This time, the story reaches the highest-ranking woman in the Inner Chambers, while the Medicine Seller confronts what Netflix describes as his most fearsome opponent yet.
There really isn't much point pretending otherwise. The Mononoke films have always looked unlike practically anything else on Netflix, but the third chapter may be the most visually overwhelming of the trilogy. Colours, patterns, textures, flattened perspectives, and constantly shifting compositions collide with one another to create something that feels simultaneously ancient and completely alien. I frequently had no idea what I was looking at. I also didn't care. That is part of the appeal.
The film draws heavily from traditional Japanese visual aesthetics, particularly ukiyo-e and classical Edo-period art, but doesn't simply reproduce them. It turns those influences into something surreal and psychologically expressive. Rooms don't merely contain characters; they seem to reflect their emotional states. The Ōoku becomes increasingly claustrophobic even when the screen is filled with enormous spaces and elaborate decoration. The result is horror that doesn't need darkness. Everything can be brightly coloured and still feel deeply unsettling.
The story itself is considerably more straightforward than its presentation might suggest. Yukiko, the Emperor's lawful wife, finally gives birth to a male heir after years of waiting, only for that happiness to collapse into grief. Her despair becomes entangled with a larger conspiracy, while strange tremors begin disturbing the Inner Chambers and deaths follow that are increasingly impossible to explain through ordinary means. The Medicine Seller eventually encounters a great serpent Mononoke, but as always, simply fighting it isn't enough. He must uncover its Shape, Truth and Reason before the Sacred Sword can be drawn.
The supernatural horror is therefore inseparable from the human horror that created it. Grief becomes rage. Repression becomes violence. Resentment survives long after the people responsible for it are gone. The serpent is frightening because of what it represents, not merely because it is a giant supernatural snake. And there is a lot of resentment in this place.
The film's exploration of the Ōoku's history is where it becomes particularly interesting. Rather than treating the setting simply as an exotic backdrop for supernatural events, the story digs into the institution itself and the history that produced it. The answers eventually reach back 150 years, to the creation of the Inner Chambers and the people whose decisions shaped the system that followed. That makes the final chapter feel appropriately expansive.
The first film focused on a newly arrived maid. The second moved upward to the elite concubines. The third reaches the highest level of the hierarchy. Netflix has described this progression as a deliberate structure across the trilogy, with each chapter examining the anguish and internal struggles of women from different positions within the Ōoku. I think that structure pays off.
What initially looks like three separate supernatural stories gradually begins to feel like three perspectives on the same oppressive environment. The higher the films climb through the hierarchy, the more complicated the relationship between privilege and suffering becomes. Power doesn't necessarily make these women freer. Sometimes it simply gives them more elaborate ways of being trapped.
The voice performances are also excellent. Hiroshi Kamiya remains perfectly suited to the Medicine Seller, giving him that strange combination of detachment, confidence, and barely concealed menace. He never behaves like a conventional action hero. Even when he's facing something enormous and grotesque, there is an almost irritating calmness to him. Which, admittedly, is probably why I enjoy him so much. Everyone else is having the worst day of their lives, and this man is essentially standing there thinking, I have seen worse.
Atsumi Tanezaki brings considerable emotional weight to Yukiko, whose grief becomes one of the film's central forces. The supporting cast—including Miyu Irino, Kenjiro Tsuda and Yoshiko Sakakibara—also gives the increasingly complicated mythology enough personality to keep it from becoming pure visual abstraction. Where I did struggle somewhat was with the density of the mythology. If you have followed the previous two films closely, there is a lot here to appreciate. The film rewards familiarity with the trilogy's recurring ideas and characters, and the connections between the chapters give the finale additional weight.
The film throws historical context, supernatural mythology, family relationships, institutional history, and emotional symbolism at you with very little interest in slowing down to make sure you've processed everything. There are moments when I understood the emotion of a scene long before I understood its precise narrative mechanics. But strangely, that doesn't completely hurt the experience. Mononoke has always operated on atmosphere and symbolism as much as conventional exposition. Its stories aren't designed to be consumed like straightforward horror mysteries where every clue is neatly labelled and placed in chronological order. The confusion is partly intentional. You're supposed to feel the characters' inability to understand what is happening. The danger, of course, is that there is a fine line between deliberately mysterious and simply overcomplicated.
Some of the mythology could have been explained more economically, and certain revelations arrive with so much surrounding information that the emotional impact risks getting buried underneath the lore. The film has spent three chapters constructing this world, and sometimes it seems determined to make sure I know that it has constructed a lot of it. Still, the final confrontation is where the visual ambition really pays off. The serpent is not merely a creature to defeat. Its design, movement, and relationship to the environment make it feel like an extension of the film's emotional themes. The supernatural spectacle isn't separate from the story; it is the story expressed visually. That is what Mononoke does better than almost anything else in contemporary anime.
The film also understands that horror doesn't necessarily require gore or jump scares. Some of its most disturbing moments come from watching people trapped inside systems they cannot escape, carrying emotions they cannot articulate until those emotions become something monstrous. That is considerably more unsettling to me than another creature jumping out of a cupboard. As a conclusion to the trilogy, I think The Curse of the Serpent works because it doesn't try to become bigger simply for the sake of being the finale. It becomes more historical, more psychological, and more concerned with the origins of the Ōoku itself. The mythology expands, but so does the sense that these supernatural events are connected to generations of human suffering.
It is not the easiest film to watch. It is certainly not the sort of anime I would recommend to someone who wants a straightforward horror movie with a beginning, middle, and end that politely introduces itself before proceeding. But if you've made it through the first two chapters, this is absolutely worth seeing through. The trilogy has built something unusually cohesive out of its combination of Japanese history, psychological horror, folklore and extraordinarily stylised animation. And The Curse of the Serpent feels like a genuine conclusion rather than simply another instalment wearing a finale costume. There are plenty of anime films that can give you gorgeous animation. There are plenty that can give you supernatural horror. There are plenty that can give you complicated mythology. Mononoke somehow decided you needed all three at once, wrapped them in ukiyo-e-inspired psychedelia, and then added a giant serpent for good measure.
Final Score- [8.5/10]
Reviewed by - Anjali Sharma
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Publisher at Midgard Times