By Just when you think you can’t find a movie with a worse title than Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), leave it to Japan to give us the even more nonsensically long Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle.
Annoyingly long title aside, Demon Slayer has rapidly become one of the premier anime of the decade. While it debuted in 2019 to strong critical and fan reception, its popularity truly took off with the release of the Mugen Train movie in 2020. That film became the highest-grossing movie of the year, but keep in mind that was also the year Covid-19 wrecked the box office, so its success in that department definitely needs a few asterisks. Since then, not a year goes by without some new Demon Slayer installment, and Infinity Train is set to be the most vital one yet.
Unlike most major anime franchises, the Demon Slayer films are all canon and essential to understanding the story. Infinity Train is set to be the first part in a trilogy of films depicting the climax of the series (or at the very least the first half of the climax), with the first film barreling into theaters with all the spectacle you would expect from a lavish anime production. Even before the dust from the weekend box office settled, Infinity Castle had the largest debut on any anime film ever released in the West. Its success is unquestionable, and the production studio, Ufotable, must be patting itself on the back for making a ludicrous amount of money.
Shame the movie kind of sucks.
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle
Director: Haruo Sotozaki
Release Date: September 12, 2025 (Theatrical)
Rating: R
Let’s make this perfectly clear: if you’re not already a Demon Slayer fan, you’re not going to get this film. At all. It’s building upon four seasons of an anime and a theatrical film, and expects you to be aware of every major and minor character established in the series up until this point. To be clear, that’s not a negative against Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. For a film that is marketing itself as the beginning of the end for the series, it’s pretty clear about that fact, and no one should be surprised by it in the slightest.
And no one should be surprised when I say that the animation is drop-dead gorgeous. Ufotable has consistently done the series justice by depicting its battles with a sense of speed and artistry that makes any other action anime pale in comparison. Every fight scene in Infinity Castle is excellently animated, and the way the camera shifts and moves across the battlefield to show the speed of each bout makes it feel all the more dynamic. This is popcorn entertainment at its finest, and if you’re the kind of person who loves it when Demon Slayer cuts loose, every fight scene here is handled with the utmost care. It’s a damn pretty movie, and it knows it.
But therein lies the problem – it’s a movie. If Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle were presented as a TV series, then I would have very few issues with it at all. Chopped up into 7 or 8 episodes, Infinity Castle would be an excellent first installment of a 24-episode season aimed at finally ending the series. But the decision to turn what should have been a TV show into a trilogy of films, while still pacing the film like a TV show, means that the narrative almost completely falls apart in its execution. For over two and a half hours, the audience is forced to slog through some of the series’ worst tendencies, but embellished to the nth degree.
Copyright: Sony, Crunchyroll
At its most basic level, the film focuses on three different fights. The first is the fight between the sociopathic ice demon Doma (Mamoru Miyano/Stephen Fu) and the Insect Hashira, Shinobu Kocho (Saori Hayami/Erika Harlacher), and it’s a great microcosm of all of the pacing issues that will plague the film. The fight scene, as I said before, is great, but it’s interrupted several times by numerous flashbacks to flesh out both Doma and Shinobu. It feels like almost every minute, we cut away to a flashback so that we can have a deeper understanding of both characters, but it absolutely ruins the pacing of the fight. If you were to take a shot for every time Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle interrupts itself to provide backstory, then you’ll be hammered before the Doma fight ends. Even then, it doesn’t really end, because after a pivotal moment, we cut away to other fights and never return to this one, leaving the fate of the characters in limbo.
Hardcore fans will cry out at this criticism, though, saying that it’s true to the source material. And yes, the original series does begin this arc with the Doma fight, and also doesn’t provide closure to the fight until much later. However, that doesn’t excuse the poor pacing, either in the film or the source material. Bad pacing is bad pacing, no matter what medium you’re in. But the narrative problems are only getting started.
Following the Doma fight, we cut to Zenitsu (Hiro Shimono/Aleks Le), who is fighting his longtime rival/nemesis Kaigaku (Yoshimasa Hosoya/Alejandro Saab). Don’t know who Kaigaku is? Don’t worry, this is technically his debut. The Zenitsu fight is the shortest of the three main fights, but it’s the most baffling one because the film treats it as the culmination of an arc that the character has been undergoing for multiple seasons. Except it isn’t. Kaigaku is just thrown in, and we get a huge exposition dump between the two of them on why they hate each other.
Copyright: Sony, Crunchyroll
Again, the fight scene itself is great, and if you like Zenitsu (for some reason), you’ll be sure to be thrilled at how the fight plays out. But if you ever stop and think about the whys or the hows of any of these fights, the story crumbles. Demon Slayer, as a series, is accustomed to providing pulse-pounding action, then taking a step back to examine the emotional stakes of it all. That may be all well and good, but if this is meant to be the climax of the series, we shouldn’t need to have an exposition dump explaining the emotional stakes. They should already be obvious to longtime fans.
That couldn’t be more apparent than in the main event of the film, the fight against Akaza (Akira Ishida/Lucien Dodge). The stakes were already established back in Mugen Train. He killed Tanjiro’s friend/mentor Rengoku. He’s been hiding in the shadows ever since and looking for an opportunity to fight Tanjiro. When he bursts onscreen, the first thing Tanjiro does is scream and lunge at him with his sword, swearing vengeance for Rengoku. It’s a great set-up, and the fight itself is a wonderful payoff. We spent years picturing what the fight would be like and how balls-to-the-wall it was going to be, and it delivers on all fronts. It even throws aside series-established rules just to ensure that it gives audiences as many “oh shit” moments as possible.
And then, right before the battle ends, we get a 40-minute flashback explaining who Akaza is, so we can empathize with him.
Copyright: Sony, Crunchyroll
No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This isn’t even just an issue from a character point of view, although it most certainly is. The issue is that the climax of the film isn’t actually the fight against Akaza. It’s his backstory. Once his backstory ends, the film ends, and we cut to the credits. We don’t end on a dramatic mortal blow to one of the most prevalent antagonists of the series. We instead get a plodding sequence of events that ruin any momentum the film had going for it.
This is an adaptation. Ufotable has shown that they’re not afraid to mix and match certain sequences from the manga or embellish a few points here and there to make episodes more entertaining. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is so slavishly devoted to ensuring that the pacing of the manga is kept intact, even if it makes no sense for a theatrical film. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle feels like an absolute slog to get through. I saw it with friends, and there were points during the Akaza flashback that each of us had checked out of the film. I just wanted it to end.
And don’t forget… this is only part one. There are two more films coming, and I’m actually dreading having to watch them, knowing what I know about the manga. I know that the flashbacks for the remaining antagonists and heroes, of which there are many, are going to rudely interrupt the fight scenes. They’re going to pull the same tired tricks of trying to emotionally manipulate audiences into feeling sympathetic for characters that, frankly, we don’t really know. The surviving characters aren’t well defined, and the few that are fall into several tired and dull archetypes. They’re vehicles for fight scenes, and I have no problem with that, but Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle, and Demon Slayer as a whole, keep pretending that it’s greater than that, and its narrative is more impactful than it is.
Copyright: Sony, Crunchyroll
I kind of hate the fact that I’m this annoyed with Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle. I liked the first two seasons of the show. I think Mugen Train is a great action film. The manga, while short, is still fun and a great read. But I can’t deny that in recent years, Demon Slayer has become so bloated and self-important that it’s hard not to become aggravated with it. Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is the natural endpoint for a series that people keep calling excellent and revolutionary. It becomes bigger and bolder and more resolute in its decisions, even if they’re wrong. This is not have you pace or structure a movie, and this isn’t how you provide resolution to years of character development. But very few people will say otherwise because money talks, and Demon Slayer is a veritable cash cow.
So we’ll meet again in another year, Demon Slayer. I expect you to learn no lessons from this cinematic experience. I expect the fight scenes will still be incredible, but the story will be as empty as the hole in Rengoku’s chest. Maybe in a few years, people will be more critical of the way Demon Slayer decided to present its climax, but as of now, those criticisms are drowned out by the rapturous chorus of “HYPE” and “GOAT.” I’m still on this demon-killing ride, but it’s only because of the sunk-cost fallacy.
