Aku no Hana Review!!

Short Review: Aku no Hana, brilliantly brutal, dark and capitvating

Full Review: Teenage angst, love triangles, and melodrama are all really tacky aspects for a series to handle, but if there’s one series that does a near impeccable job handling these aspects, it’s Aku no Hana.

The pacing is slow. It’s really, really, really slow, but it works. It works brilliantly. It was a little jarring at first with how slow events were taking place, but then it became clear that this show just would have never worked if it paced itself faster. Aku no Hana takes its time building up the atmosphere, beautifully fleshing out the characters and bringing them to life. Aku no Hana doesn’t like to make scenes snappy, instead it takes as much time as it wants drawing them out.

While watching Aku no Hana, I didn’t feel like I was watching ordinary anime anymore, but real life events unfolding right in front of my eyes. I felt like I was actually a passerby standing right in the scene, observing everything that was going on. I wasn’t in my room anymore, I was there. That’s how immersed I was with the whole experience.

And an ugly experience it was.  A beautifully ugly experience.

Aku no Hana never once showcases the beauty of human nature, society or the world we live in. It doesn’t even end on a hopeful note. Aku no Hana throws you out of your comfort zone and blatantly tells you how cruel and cynical our world can really be at times, that sometimes there really is no hope.

Aku no Hana achieves this bleak theme with the main cast who no longer feel merely as characters, but as actual human beings. They’re fantastically well-acted and far from likeable in a believable way. Kasuga isn’t a terrible person, but he makes rash decisions and digs himself deeper and deeper into a hole by running away from his problems. Nakamura is so insecure and broken down inside, that she instills this narrow mindset where people are either deviants or not. Saeki is foolish and completely driven by her infatuation for Kasuga.

By the end, all three characters wore me down so much that I was yelling at their naivety and ultimately putting my face in the palms of my hands, but not because the decisions they made were poorly written and delivered, but  quite the opposite. Every character mirrors reality perfectly, so much that’s it’s almost terrifying.

Aku no Hana screwed with my perspective on life the same brilliant way Aoi Bungaku and Welcome to the NHKdid as I watched it. But alas, there are just a few flaws with the series. Yes, it was a little uneventful at first, the series ends on a major cliffhanger, but more importantly the series just became so abrasively dark that I eventually grimaced through the final episodes.

Final Verdict:

Story – Brutally realistic and captivating

Characters – Terrifying and frustratingly realistic. Fantastically well-acted and all relatable in some way or another

Setting – Completely immersive and lifelike

Production Values – The rotoscope and character designs were jarring at first sight, but I eventually grew used to them and realized this show wouldn’t have worked any other way. Both the background art and soundtrack are beautifully ugly.

Do I recommend?: Aku no Hana is a rare anime that captures the atrocious side of life perfectly, but it’s hard for me to recommend a series like this. The fact that the show is so downright cynical will turn people away as well as the incredibly slow pacing. If you like dark psychological drama, give this one a chance and see for yourself.

94/100 (Fantastic)