Aragne no Mushikago

Life could be better for shy, anxious university student Rin. The apartment she has rented is hardly the sunny palace the rental listings suggested. The housing complex is rundown, grim and haunted by troubled souls lurking in dark corners. Ghastly crimes are occurring in the vicinity. And a grinning stranger makes his unsettling presence known.

Beyond all this, Rin is coming to realize that something even more sinister is manifesting itself, something at the cursed crossroads of mythology, monstrosity and medical science. Determined to find out more, Rin visits the library, where she meets a sympathetic young staffer. But what she learns does not begin to put her mind at ease.

(Source: Fantasia)

Rin Main

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Mikaya Main

Batori, Shougo Japanese

Saion Main

Katayama, Fukujuurou Japanese

Tokiyo Main

Itou, Yousuke Japanese

Nasuha Main

Shiramoto, Ayana Japanese

Terakubo Supporting

Hashi, Takaya Japanese

Kirika Supporting

Fukui, Yukari Japanese

Fukutani, Osamu Producer

Sakamoto, Saku Director, Script, Original Creator, Music, Animation Director

Memai SIREN Theme Song Performance

Reviews

Nov 4, 2024

bmxer44

Recommended

If your looking for a thorough positive review you probably already read it. I don't under stand why it has such a horrible score. I found it to be really well done, and original.

The art style is off putting as it should be, its a horror movie. When she walks its disorienting which is frickin amazing. Obviously by how well drawn everything is the choice to make it this way was intentional. Someone who is looking for an anime with the same animation style as every other one will not like this one but that's ok.

I thought the similar things about Aku no Hana ... and that's one of my all time favorites.

8/10 Overall

(I, me, my, you)

Reviewer’s Rating: 8

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Jan 28, 2025

joethedodo

Mixed Feelings

Aragne no Mushikago is definitely a confusing anime for the majority of people. The simple idea is that it follows this girl who moves into this new apartment complex and weird creepy things start happening around her. The actual plot of the movie is confusing and you'll end up seeing a lot of scenes or things that make you go ???. The amount of dialogue is limited so this adds to the confusion of the movie coupled with an ending that makes no sense. The animation is disappointingly poor for an anime that is fairly new. The one good thing about this anime though is ... the atmosphere, it does it greatly and builds up a very nice horror feeling with a few jumpscares here and there it does really immerse you. Overall, if you can sit through a somewhat poor animation and confusing story the atmosphere is worth it but don't come in expecting something perfect as there is practically not much of a plot nor development.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Mar 26, 2025

MaiDeNaBysS

Not Recommended

This is the 'sequel' to Amrita (which the creator more appropriately calls a spinoff), though it has almost no connection aside from the same apartment setting (but beyond the shared insect theme the monster happenings are completely different) and Amrita has a momentary unrelated scene cameo of the 2 main girls of this movie existing tossed in at the end, and with the potential for achronology it isn't even possible to say which movie actually takes place first. They are inconsequential to each other in terms of watch order, but I'd recommend Amrita instead, since it's short and better quality, and only this movie if ... you really want to see more but worse.
Both movies were written/directed/animated by a single guy which is a bit impressive but also a bit pompous and obviously shoots it in the foot in terms of severely limiting man-hours/productivity and it really shows in the limited quality of all aspects of the production, would it really kill him to delegate some menial labor to some underpaid animators? Hell he'd make way more money just from increased productivity let alone that it would be better quality.

This movie's not good.
There is a huge amount of filler of just nothing going on. Even the non-filler is mostly boring.
The art style is often comically bad (2D faces wrapped over 3D poly-mesh heads, the MC's eyes are very far apart) and the rare attempts at actual visuals are almost completely uninteresting.
The horror is barely present inundated in filler and even less horrifying than Amrita.
The characters are not characters despite the insane amount of time we spend watching the MC... moving, standing, panicking, etc.

The story past a pointless, empty, long, slow drag of a first half of a mental MC isolated in their apartment while a serial killer attacks everyone seemingly directly inspired by Silent Hill 4: The Room, progressively turns towards what also seems directly inspired by Silent Hill 2 to the point many story beats and even some entire scenes seem ripped straight from them. I can even explain what this movie's 'plot' is meant to be based on that comparison, with the hellish setting, memories of regret revealing love-hate murder/loss and an ending attempting to reconcile that regret with sacrifice towards redemption/rebirth... but it would be pointless because there is little actually here beyond a continuous sequence of contrivances and a bunch of vaguery where dozens of different explanations are possible (and all of them rely on bs logic so all are almost equally as worthwhile as 'it was all just a dream') along with characters/plot points it keeps throwing in and pointlessly throwing away as it goes.
(Some other Silent Hill parallels: haunted town/apartment complex, falling within interior holes into deeper areas that look like meat processing areas and old facilities that housed past war/prisoner experiments giving rise to body-horror monsters, ominous moths/butterflies, pyramid-heads in this and Amrita, etc.)
The creator relies way too much on subtle subtext to vaguely and briefly convey too many ideas at the end while leaving most everything else largely unexplored because it is such a short runtime full of way too much filler. So either the point of 80% of the movie went over my head or he just wasted most of the story on bs serial killer filler scenes while ripping off some 'cool' ideas from Silent Hill and threw them all together without actual consideration behind it while relying on ambiguity to try to seem like maybe there is more depth than there is.
Even a glancing look at certain 'plot' points should reveal which it is (spoilers below):
The serial killer the story wastes a ton of time emptily referencing is revealed in the end to be a noncharacter who we've never actually interacted with.
A random bookish guy conveniently spots the MC to exposition dump a bunch of generic/vague exposition filler about the insects/disease/spirit world and the omen of death butterfly before being seen next pointlessly murdered.
A random other guy is revealed to be a spiritualist who knows all about the otherworld insects and gives the MC a protective necklace and a little vague/generic exposition filler before pointlessly dying in his next scene.
The blond guy is revealed to be a shonen protagonist (from organization XIII fighting the nobodies/heartless jk but it does fit) monster hunter (who is also another serial killer since the monsters he kills were the girls infected by the other serial killer, though it seems a pretty severe case of nonsense that he went through an entire chase sequence to attack the MC with his bonesaw for no reason 'it was all a dream fku') who conveniently saves MC in the middle of nowhere and starts exposition dumping a bunch of generic explanations of monsters existing before immediately being killed by a car suddenly armghost-commandeered to drive off a highway overpass into the upper floor window to kill him(where no one knows he is) followed by a bunch of explosions (did I mention this director seems to have gone to the Michael Bay school of tons of pointless explosions for this movie? Even a butterfly randomly shows up to save the MC from a monster by exploding like a cluster bomb for no reason)...
In other words the director waved in front of the audience's faces yet another super knowledgeable person giving the opportunity to have any coherency where the plot would actually go with them somewhere beyond random bs and immediately slaps the audience in the face by absurdly contriving a reason for them to be removed from the story as nothing more than a pointless waste-of-time exposition-dump mad-lib of this series' flavor of generic monster details. The only conclusion I can draw from it is that the writer in fact meant it as a slap in the face to the audience but I suppose it could just be the writer trying his best when his best is just shitty exposition dumps and an inability to write anything more complex than a collection of loosely strung together ideas which therefore can go no further than: dies or wakes up from plot-armor death, which come to think of it is more or less the content of both Amrita and Aragne...

And according to an interview from the creator, it originally had a single plot, then while animating he added a bunch of other elements to it turning it into a Frankenstein story with a bunch of scenes relegated to nonreality dream sequences to try to cobble together some coherency.

The black-haired ballet (why ballet? no reason) girl romance-bait (because gaybaiting just like Amrita) who dies much like all the others having contributed nothing of value to the plot seems the most apparent example of Frankensteining as she is the same character model as the black-haired childhood girl but a different name, conflating 2 characters out of seemingly 1 original just like they did with the MC conflating the coma blonde girl but actually being the black-haired girl, all now reworked into an overcomplicated mess that would've been really interesting if it had been the central plot instead of being a brief flashback-montage dump tossed in schizophrenically at the end which renders the entirety of the black-haired girl we see interacting with her and others before being killed as confusing at best (explained away as: this random girl just happens to look like the black-haired girl so the MC is reminded of her past self and thus conflating this girl as herself) or less ideally (and realistically what +99% viewers would conclude): 'just a dream fku' among other equally unsatisfying bs explanations for this pointlessly confusing contrivance on top of the plotline itself being pointless filler either way. (And none of them are related to the serial killer mother either since the creator gave them different full names).
This is like a horror version of tropey spanish soap operas replete with twins swapping places, amnesia, comas, doppelgangers, dream sequences, etc. all to just contrive an even more convoluted plot for no reason. It didn't have to be this way.
(Even just a bit of editing and added lines explaining the story at the end (Howl's Moving Castle does this type of mystery reveal ending well for example) would've taken this from 'a silly movie with a convoluted plot buried under so much ambiguity and subtext that only a handful of people in the world would even bother to unbury it' to a decent story people could enjoy, even if one doesn't also cut out a ton of pointless filler).

The Japanese title is: Insect |Cage/Prison| of Aragne (Arachne of various forms anglicized from Greek myth of the woman turned into a spider by a god(now that I think of it, the MC with her time powers could be the main antagonist red brain arachnid woman monster of the other movie through the art of even more bs contrivance), but also it's written on the MC's medicine prescription as either the name of the medication or a 3rd alias for the MC (alongside _atopy which is a disease of excess allergic reactions and etymologically means 'being out of place' but that could be nothing since it seems to be preceded by A/L/R) (because she's trapped in the cursed insect-riddled apartment, and in the movie insects are inherently part of the soul and coming out of the bodies, and the trapped in an undying body undead, and the girl trapped in a coma where the afterlife is insects judging souls of the dead).
The English subtitle is: Aragne: Sign of Vermillion (vermillion being an etymology pun derived from a root meaning worm/larva(and also an associated disease that causes madness) and being the latin namesake for an insect from which the vermillion-red dye was made) (the 'sign of vermillion' being: the red butterfly omens of bug infection/death, the spirit-bugs stuff in general, and blood from violence)

It is apparent what much of the story elements are trying to be: the pointless prologue's red tree hallucination seems to shallowly symbolize the brain (paralleling the brain that comes out later), black-haired girl's abusive mother is symbolized by the serial killer mother (who is another case of splitting 1 character model into 2 as she could just as easily have been the actual mother of either of the black-haired girls who are also multiple characters from 1), her trauma symbolized by the mothers' apartment and the bathtub her mother would drown her in, (mentioning by cringe dialogue) the very notion of 'a fate worse than death' as a theme with coma and the monsters, blonde MC's brain leaving her trapped body (representing part of her soul leaving her body) as coma metaphor, MC has a scar on her neck because she was pushed as a child cutting her neck (but also the scar is revealed after a death-dream cutaway from the mother's apartment hoodie attack so interpretable as maybe she was infected/cured) paralleling the broken neck curse/bugs and the blonde girl breaking her neck in her fall, black-haired girl metamorphoses death butterfly wings and blonde MC metamorphoses lunar moth rebirth wings as symbolism of each girl as well as the MC's inner conflict (based on Asian mythology of the two parts of the soul, hun(black higher soul) and po(lunar/white lower/basal soul), of which the po remains in the body after death while the hun leaves coinciding with the spirit bugs/undead monsters, coma girl, and the MC's inner conflict with herself between her new (stolen) identity and her black-haired past) culminating in the black-haired childhood friend (giving up her jealousy so now black-haired again, and so giving back the life she took) sacrificing(part of her soul I suppose)/redeeming herself in a reversion of pushing her down into a coma now pulling her up for the blonde's rebirth from coma as black-hair falls instead into the spirit-bugs that judge the dead.
It's great as individual pieces, but it comes with SO much dumb contrivance to arbitrarily shove the noncharacter set-pieces into position for each scene, and each element of the story comes with so many caveats of pervasive ambiguity from excessive subtlety(vaguery) as to force them to remain disconnected ideas because any attempt to bring them together into a coherent plot gets frustrated by how thoughtlessly tossed together it is since every explanation is equally bs and nonsensical:
The armghosts that come out of nowhere phasing from within the steering wheel? the monsters are undead corpse monsters not ghosts, there aren't supposed to be ghost poltergeists here, literal nonsense on top of nonsense... The mother who represents the MC's abusive mother was a member of a circle of insect-spiritualists defending everyone from otherworldly insects and is now killing everyone and presumably making monsters for no reason... Suddenly blonde MC was actually black-haired childhood friend of blonde girl having taken on her name and hair color after making her fall into a coma, yet she seemingly didn't recognize someone (who also does ballet like her) who looks exactly like herself with black hair standing in front of her... Suddenly the black-haired girl, who represents MC's inner self but is actually someone else (because she gave a different name), died from infection by the serial killer woman who represents but is not actually her abusive mother (because the creator gave her a different name on his website) and decapitation by some random EMT guy from the spiritualist circle... Either it was all just a pointless dream of blonde coma girl before she woke up, or she never actually woke up and is just death-dreaming, or the MC randomly gained fku god powers from being put in the psychic experiment machine and nothing matters because fku she woke coma girl up, or MC was the blonde girl and had already woken up from her coma before the start and was moving into the apartments and you put way too much certainty into a single vague scene where black-hair girl grows up and is replaced by blonde girl... MC is put in the psychic experiment machine alive after having been stabbed to death in the heart yet the blood and wounds shown prior and in transit are not there so either continuity error or more bs... coma girl wakes up in the insect hell version of reality or very unlikely in a post-apocalyptic future despite the incongruity of her being fine and with flowers and whatnot in that scenario (but it is alluded by the scene of the doctor and city being attacked by the monsters after the shonen savior dies and is now no longer stopping the monsters (except this isn't really infectious (at least much) unlike a zombie apocalypse so it wouldn't spread much)...
If the plot had actually come together it would've been a decent movie, but it's all pointless bs because pretty much every plot point in the movie has its own series of caveats of ambiguity on top of multiple overlapping layers of dream-bs, and all possibilities render entire swaths of the movie nonsensical if not just pointless dream bs. And the audience has no reason to look any deeper than the surface level because all the other characters are nonentities introduced just to die in a bunch of dumbly contrived filler scenes in a movie with scenes that deliberately make a point to insult the very notion of good storywriting.

Reviewer’s Rating: 3

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