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Send this poor, mentally ill/schizophrenic child to a non-quack doctor. That was genuinely what I was thinking for much of the movie, all the more by the end of it.

This movie barely goes anywhere and is almost completely SoL filler aside from a single exposition dump dialogue scene. The plot, beyond irrelevant specifics, is extremely predictable and boring, relying on unearned heartstring pulling. No justice for boat guy's irrelevance to the movie. No point to random fat-shamed character. No point to random exposition dump art-lady. The plot of this movie is summarized in one minute of exposition dialogue and spends the entire rest of the ... movie insincerely baiting a shallow romance while tipping its hand on a pointless mystery that is hard to care about as they present it in the most excessively saccharine way.

It's a very shonen/action-focused anime. There really isn't much story nor anything meaningful explored beyond a series of mindless fights between various combinations of claymore warrior women and human-eating demon monsters. It never actually goes anywhere and just sort of reaches the end of the season still climbing that ladder as bait for the manga.
The characters are barely allowed to have any presence beyond rehashing brain-damaging exposition/narration/peptalks and their 1-note character traits. The closest it comes to having actual characters in an arc gets unceremoniously cut through extreme contrivance. The plot armor is everywhere with pretty much every fight being nonsensical asspulls of more and ... more powers being thrown in on top of the power of tryharding/friendship/love/etc to win from start to finish.
To be fair, as far as generic action-shonen go you could do much worse. At least this has some grittiness to it.

You have to look at older media through the lens of understanding that before modern internet there was a severe scarcity of porn such that any media depicting high-quality pornographic material wrapped within the veneer of a socially acceptable production would be regarded as a masterpiece. That is what has happened here with Soul(Ghost) in the Body(Shell) just like it did with A Clockwork Orange(A Machine in the Fruit, if you will).

Getting to the actual review: How do we start? Director's masturbational intro cinematics of naked female body bodying (very important). Followed by long directorial vomit of self-indulgent concept art of the city in which ... nothing happens. Oh-yeahh, waste my time harder, director daddy. Then they stumble through pointless stormtrooper action scenes and exposition dialogues of characters telling each other who they are and everything else they've already known about each other for the years they've worked together, interspersed by juvenile philosophical rambling that grapples with such worthwhile ideas as: 'How can one scientifically disprove that a machine isn't alive when one cannot scientifically define the arbitrary definitions of words?' and 'What is a person? I don't know.' By then over half the movie will be over and nothing of consequence will have happened. Then just finish it off with even more drawnout action sequence of stormtrooper bs and... I'm god of the machine now, k bye. The End.

This movie wasted so much potential of having such a well developed world from the manga, too bad the source material is episodic nonstories like this movie and the script writer is an amateur who couldn't cobble together much better.

A poorly written story of filler character drama to convey the very basic concept of escapism.
Meanwhile, the memetic concept of Lil-Slugger and Maromi is maybe only in people's heads but also maybe real, while completely overlooking that the entire conflict of the entire story affecting the entirety of the city gets resolved immediately after fmc arbitrarily faces her trauma instead of resorting to escapism immediately after being confronted with it, and this one act immediately solves the entire memetic problem for everyone else, completely destroying the argument that it isn't a real entity.
Pointless 2D character plotlines that go nowhere and haphazardly thrown in ideas and ... plot contrivances because it's just so cool that random old man is a plot contrivance doing math for no reason and random otaku exists and their dolls are maybe an autonomous ai program plot contrivance to have the police assistant to save the day and then become like the old man doing math for no reason and trust me the author says, this story is very deep because it pointlessly started with the empty ending scene of random escapism-inducing society stuff.

Who is the audience for this?
The BL is barely 2 goodbye pecks on the lips, and it's barely any romance overall with the leads being at best acquaintances who have almost no character consistency, wildly oscillating between: annoyance, abuser and enabler, friend, etc. on a dime, yet most of these characters who were actively going to slit others' throats will randomly become willing to give their lives to help them.
All the characters are terrible, lacking in almost any personality beyond grumbling aside from the innocent goodboy non-character MC who may as well have been a golden retriever dog, at least then the timewasting filler dialogue ... would've been avoided.
There's barely any sci-fi elements beyond random autonomous robot plot-contrivances used solely for chores and running messages rather than enforcing the 1984 surveillance government's control, and whatever sci-fi they attempt goes nowhere and instead becomes a nonsense plotline about some random fantasy nature deity who deus-ex-machinas the whole show in the end.
There's little action.
There's very little plot, outside the beginning and end the characters mostly just wander around doing filler like washing dogs, arguing about nothing, pulling up random plot threads that'll go nowhere... The actions of the cast didn't really have any relevance to the plot, the ending would've happened with or without them.

This show goes through so many of the same overall story beats as Fractale, except that anime did better in every way (though that is a low bar).

Just watch Hellsing Ultimate instead, and if you want an alternate version done conceivably better, watch the TeamFourStar Hellsing Ultimate Abridged parody.

Entirely and drastically inferior version to the Hellsing Ultimate reboot. This covers the same story but was made before the source material was finished so it has an uninspired filler ending of a fight with some generic cringe evil vampire. Starts off slow and after ep 1 the cinematography falls off completely. Even the story itself goes nowhere with nothing to say, even sidelining the Judas Priest. The characters are boring since the dialogue is all pointless filler. The art is low-effort and poor ... resolution.

There are no characters here. The main duo are: Generic self-insert guy who is explicitly a blank slate devoid of any character aside from the 1-note of the original novel author's self-fellation of books, he likes books, he reads books, he's a librarian, books books books, library library library, Le Petite Prince, diary diary diary, texting texting texting. The girl is generic dying perfect dreamgirl who exists to throw herself at the MC and force him to learn the wonders of generic socialization one childish platonic crush date at a time.
The other students (who are all laughably barely present noncharacters) are assumptive angry manipulative assholes ... who refuse to allow her any agency as a person and bully the guy they don't know for no reason just because he interacted with her. Of course the author has no awareness of this bizarre narcissism because he wrote the girl to be hypocritically forcing her will onto MC in exactly the same way as she complains about in others and her ex(another aforementioned noncharacter asshole student who does nothing but be jealous once).
There's 1 laughable side plot of the only other 2 characters, who would've been better off cut from the movie instead of having one sitting around offering bubblegum and the other shouting pointlessly every scene until the end when it is used for a pointless 'and then they started dating' ending despite having the side characters literally never interact in a single scene for the entire movie.
Lastly is the mother of FMC who exists for 1 scene to say "thanks, read this."

Character explicitly name dropping "I want to eat your pancreas" like some kind of cringe Hot Tub Time Machine.

The plot spoils itself from the first scene: She dies after they get to know each other and caring about each other. It generically and mundanely presents the very basic notion of memento mori(remember you will die). It doesn't actually dig into anything of its themes, instead filling the movie with small talk and ultimately concluding with a bunch of generic empty fluff words about how "there are no words to describe our relationship, null character guy. Thank you for spending time with me." The end.

It's a really great fantasy premise, but a really terrible execution on top of being used as a macGuffin vehicle for a terribly cringeworthy kiddy-romance.

It's really rough kiddyschool SoL for much of the first half. The FMC is portrayed in such a 'child-oriented man writing little girl' way, the 'romance'(nonromance) is absurdly forced for the entire movie. She's somehow all at once just a typical idiot who's suicidal, bipolar, autistic, narcissistic, cringe butt-bumping her crush and declaring her love to him constantly despite barely knowing him only through stalking as a cat, etc. She's a lunatic with zero ability to read the room or display ... any competency for the entire movie. This alone entirely robs it of any fantastical charm, somehow being all of the worst aspects of The Cat Returns cranked up to 100, (Watch that instead).

The story is just silly contrivances for the mask macGuffin, and the characters love each other in the end (despite still having almost never actually had a conversation together about anything) just because they're the MCs and she smells nice or whatever (he literally knows nothing about her except in the end that she loves him for (to paraphrase her explanation) 'being a typical guy who pet a cat' and was creepily stalking him as a cat).

The other human characters are all normal (aside from an excess of annoying bully comedic relief non-characters), like shockingly so compared to FMC. Unfortunately none of them actually have any real significance in the story. Her biomother is just as bipolar as the FMC for pointless drama trying to get the FMC in 2 brief instances (and 1 text). This went nowhere in the end, could've just had her die/never come back (and had a theme of FMC dealing with trauma of rejection rather than 'wahhh I'm such a perfect selfless person and everyone else is only thinking about what they want when they try to be nice to me!' goddamn this narcissist) rather than waste time on characters that go nowhere. (They were definitely trying for the theme of 'other's expectations force me to wear a mask to behave how they want me to be rather than how I want to be' but it more just came out as 'communicating what I want is such a pain' the FMC literally wanted to wear a mask to be a cat rather than just be herself and use her words(the opposite of the theme) to take advantage of the Halo Effect and avoid having to actually talk to her crush... The desire of the crush to do pottery, the FMC's crush and relationship with her parents, all of them resolve immediately upon communicating what they want, literally all they had to do was say what they want because these people aren't forcing them to wear masks, they're bending over backwards to try to give them what they want, the main conflict was literally 'ugh why can't they just read my mind about what I want' (but sure, 'wearing a mask is bad, be true to yourself' is close enough to that since both involve doing what you want. except one is narcissism).

The art/animation is okay, but character movements/designs and the settings are all really uninspired. It really lacks any emotional weight.

The ending was also really contrived that the antag didn't easily overpower them and it was so pointlessly drawn out with nothing happening. (They could've actually done something interesting like pull a mask off the mask salesman's face to beat him or something but no, just uninspired macGuffining).

A very uninspired Peter Pan story. It's much like that American TV show 'Happy!' except that was a mature action comedy parodying exactly this kind of childish story played straight.

The art style is of boring western animation people in a boring Japan-English Western setting. Terribly uninspired for a fantasy story, and the fantasy stuff is very brief and often just dumb silly childish cartoon characters. Would've been better if the fantastical imagination lands were more vibrant with color instead of being more of the same.

There is nothing to really say about this. It's a shallow "growing up is a thing' and 'mortality exists oh no' ... movie of boring visuals and dumb characters. The plot is mostly 1-note with a bunch of filler and counterproductive exposition to pad the runtime before the 1-note ending happens.
This is very much a young children's movie. Which makes the overt and numerous sexual undertones of the antagonist towards children an odd choice given that it has no relevance to the story whatsoever. Not beating the allegations anime moment.

Watch Happy! instead.

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.