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This is the fourth and final movie in the rebuild series. I’m going to make the wild assumption here that you may not have seen the previous instalments or the TV series and explain a little of what’s going on.

The reason why I’d do that for a series that’s been running, in various forms, since 1995 (in Japan at any rate) is because getting to see these shows and films has not been an easy task.

The original series is currently on Netflix. None of the preceding three films in what is a related but distinct from the TV series project have been available to watch anywhere in the UK until now and it’s also been difficult to get physical copies.

Given the above, I suspect a lot of people are going to arrive at this film without necessarily knowing what’s occurring before they pick it up. It’s a bit of a shame that the first three films in the rebuild series didn’t arrive before the fourth, but that’s just the way it is.

In a brief and extremely confusing nod to this possibility, the film starts with a two-minute recap of each of the preceding films which make absolutely no sense and will probably leave you feeling more confused than just watching from a cold start. Additionally, because the first three films rewrite the events of the TV show and then take off in their own direction, watching the show on Netflix may actually lead to an even more confusing experience for a casual viewer (or even a semi-interested one).

I would suggest that if you want to understand what’s going on and are not familiar with the preceding story then watching the first three films in the series or, if you don’t have time for that, reading the wiki on the rebuild series is absolutely essential.

If you don’t, then know that the conclusion of the third film ended with a cataclysm in which the central characters played a key part and, in many ways, were ultimately responsible for. This backdrop informs much of what happens here and it makes for a brilliantly mature and thoughtful piece of film making.

The mistake would be to consider this film to be about giant robots and monsters from a weirdly fetishized Persian/Jewish mythos (so far so classical anime).

Thrice Upon a Time is about grief. I don’t simply mean about the trauma of loss but of learning to live with loss and, perhaps, emerging from the other side to see life as something worth living again.

At its heart this film has more in common with the book Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter (itself inspired by Ted Hughes’ poem, Crow) than it does with Transformers or Gundam and, in some ways, even the earlier entries in the self-same series.

The film is deeply symbolic and its imagery – beautiful, violent, sudden and immediate as it is, serves this vision of exploring the nature of grief, our part in experiencing our own loss and how we process that.

The first hour of the film sits with this quite explicitly, following the main characters as they recover from what they experienced in a rural idyll, away from the world with very few responsibilities. It’s anime as slice of life drama and works really well – bucolic, meditative and profound.

The characters variously choose isolation, throwing themselves into work and learning obsessively about others until each of them in turn begin to surface from the deep oceans of grief with which they arrived.

The explorations of anger in the face of powerlessness, or loss and even culpability for wrecking our own and others’ lives is well done and some of the most characterful animation I’ve seen since the absolutely remarkable The Red Turtle from 2016.

Hideaki Anno needs no real introduction but what he’s achieved here together with his directors, Mahiro Maeda, Katsuichi Makayama and Kazuya Tsurumaki is to put onto the screen a narrative whose real emotional depth is right there but also hidden. Does someone’s head explode because their restraining collar blows them up or is it really because they couldn’t handle being alone in the world and their part in leaving them in this position?

It’s a tongue in cheek example, except it was shots like that one above which had me sitting up and taking notice. Anno doesn’t do anything in any frame without reason and you can feel him reaching for meaning, perhaps not simply for his characters but for us all.

When life reaches points where no remediation can be achieved, no fixing is going to help, what does it mean for us? What does it mean for us to work and strive and yearn when it can all come to nothing? What if, having done everything right we still fail?

These are big questions, they’re also questions we don’t talk about much in our culture – used as we are to being able to fix most things with technology, money or a combination of both.

These explorations of grief and trauma don’t resolve themselves in this first hour but their intimacy is stripped away (as so often happens) by events beyond their control. I think I’m watching a master at work because who actually gets the time they need to process trauma? We’re all buffeted by the wider world simply carrying on as if we don’t matter – primarily because the truth of it is, we might not matter much in the scheme of things.

Pulled back into a final battle or sorts with the original driving impetus behind the entire show – Gendo, Shinji’s father and mad scientist extraordinaire, the protagonists find themselves facing conflicts in which their own responses may not be trusted and their desire to do the right thing might just destroy those very things they want to protect.

Gendo is not a crazy megalomaniac either. Using the classic trope of the lover who’s lost their soul mate, the story explores the lengths he’s prepared to go to in denying his grief, in trying to shut the door on his loss. If this is a story that’s been trodden a hundred times before, Anno brings a freshness to it not least because the imagery here is cosmic in scale and the decisions Gendo has already made in terms of cloning technology, welcoming in cosmic horror and in sacrificing even his own life, are ones which feed right into the narrative imagery of the film in which he exists. There are so many ideas here Anno does not have time to address them all and cuts away those which would never get the exploration they might deserve (to take one example at random – what kind of person is a clone?).

Gendo would prefer a reset, a world in which his loss never occurred, but really his is only one kind of response we’re shown to loss and trauma and although its exteriority – his attempt to remake the world so he does not have to face what is inside him – feels large and visual, it is not any more extreme than the solipsism or isolation explored by the others in experiencing their own grief.

But Anno doesn’t stop with the idea of grief winning out and driving us to madness. Back to Porter’s Grief is the thing with Feathers – there is the other side of grief, the coming out of it.

And in an epic third act which thrillingly reminded me of David Bowman’s journey through the wormhole at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 we have the most unexpected use of the carol Joy to the World.

Except the carol is well placed, underlining exactly the outcomes and choices the characters are making – it is, if you’ll excuse the gushing, both visionary and borderline absurd and I was very much there for it.

Evangelion rebuild was a chance for Anno to tell the story he had come to want to tell, to recast his unhappiness with the original series in a way where he could be comfortable with what an older creator, reflecting on his work and place in the world, felt he wanted to say.

I feel it is a triumph – and it has stayed with me since I watched it.

It is not for everyone. Nothing ever is, but I can see this being a divisive film – not least because it’s so different to the original series but also because it really is psychedelically cosmic in its themes and narrative. There also remains the fact that if you don’t know what has happened up until the opening moments of the film then this will make absolutely no sense to you. For that reason, I think it’s a masterpiece but one which I have to caveat by saying it works perfectly within its context whereas outside of it, it more closely resembles a rhinoceros trying to use a fork.

Rating? A guarded 10 Evas out of 10.

Stewart Hotston