Most girls waking up without any memory and meeting a serial killer would panic, but not Ray. In fact, far from being her biggest problem, killer Zack might just prove a convenient resource when it comes to finding a way out of the building in which they’re both trapped. – ANN
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 16
Source: Game (you can purchase it on Steam)
Episode 1 Summary: Rachel Gardner wakes up in an unfamiliar hospital room. She vaguely recalls meeting with a psychiatrist to help her talk through her trauma of witnessing a murder, but beyond that she has no idea where she is or why. Things about her surroundings feel unreal and there are strange cryptic words written on the walls. All Rachel wants is to leave the hospital and return to her parents, but it quickly becomes obvious that she’s in some way trapped in this scenario against her will. She takes an elevator to what appears to be a city street, and is quickly face-to-face with a terrifying man with a scythe. It’s all she can do to hide from him and keep quiet until he loses her trail. The problem is that he’s great at sniffing out victims, and comes for her just as she’s escaping back into the elevator. Rachel takes it to the next floor up and there she encounters Danny, the psychiatrist she was seeing prior to this ordeal. He makes a show of looking out for their shared interest, but quickly reveals that he has designs on Rachel’s eyes. He has a false eye, you see, and wants a replacement, and hers remind him of his dead mother’s eyes. Though she makes multiple escape attempts, Danny outsmarts her and she loses her will to keep fighting. Rachel is saved by an unlikely source – the scythe-wielding killer from the previous floor stabs Danny to death and is about to finish Rachel off, when an announcement comes over a loudspeaker. Mr. scythe broke the rules by killing another denizen of the building, and now he and Rachel have the same goal – to escape without losing their lives in the process.
Impressions: CW: discussion of mental illness and sexual assault.
While I was watching this episode, my husband asked me if this show was “as bad as it looked,” and I had to laugh; yes, this first episode was pretty trashy and gratuitous with a lot of try-hard spoopy imagery. But I actually really enjoyed it for reasons that I will try but may not be able to express successfully in this review. I tend not to enjoy anime that’s overly-violent, nihilistic, confusing for the sake of being confusing, or which otherwise seems to assume the worst of human beings. Tokyo Ghoul left me cold after a few episodes (too violent), Future Diary and Deadman Wonderland were also too cynical and focused on unrealistically terrible behavior for my tastes. There’s enough violence in this first episode that I would have expected to feel similarly about it. The thing is, though, I’m a big fan of the Silent Hill video game series (well, the first few games, at least). What I love about them is that, despite being violent, gross, and often deeply horrifying, they’re atmospheric and cut deeply into human psychology in a way that many other games attempt to but fail. I can deal with battling demons and skin monsters if it means that I get the opportunity to be truly unsettled by a protagonist’s bad life choices.
I’m by no means trying to suggest that Angels of Death is in the same quality ballpark as a Silent Hill game (well, maybe one of the late-stage ones, or perhaps Deadly Premonition…), but the first episode does contain a lot of the same traits that define that game series, including an atmospheric soundtrack, a disorienting setting, and an unreliable narrator whose true relationship to the reality of the story will likely only be revealed with time. Despite being a little goofy, with a tendency to spitball ideas to see just what will stick (seriously, there’s a lot of stuff going on in this episode and not a lot of it is necessarily easy to connect), I personally found the overall package to be compelling.
The opening scenes remind of a dream I had a while ago which continues to give me chills to this day. In the dream I was swimming in a swimming pool with my friends. I then turned away from them for a moment, and when I looked back day had shifted to night and everyone was gone but me. And by “everyone,” I truly mean everyone; I had a sense that there was literally no one left in this transformed world but myself. Rachel undergoes a similar shift in the early moments of the episode; she closes her eyes while Danny is speaking to her, and opens them to see the moonlit darkness in the hospital. She seems to know that the moon outside isn’t real, and can sense that there’s a lack of other human beings (aside from men who want to kill her, as she soon realizes). There’s also a very unsettling disconnect between the building she’s in and how it’s laid-out – the elevator leads to what appears to be an outdoor location, and then the next floor is a hospital floor with operating rooms. I get the impression that a lot of this is likely taking place only in the protagonist’s head because the atmosphere itself is very dreamlike and there are a lot of things that happen which feel that way – Rachel’s inability to escape, the logical disconnect between the rooms and floors, and the indistinctness of place and time all read as false.
I think what makes this scary to me is that, having struggled with some mental illness, I’ve found that it can be difficult to convince others that my feelings about things are legitimate even if they aren’t based in logic. My anxiety is sometimes triggered by things that wouldn’t seem “that bad” to most people, and to try to explain that to someone who isn’t similarly afflicted can be frustrating (and has made me feel as though I’m even “crazier” than I am, it sucks). Rachel is clearly suffering from PTSD; we don’t know the details other than that she witnessed a murder, but the result is that she dissociates a few times throughout the episode and perhaps sees things that aren’t physically there. The idea that the time and place and the people within it might be unreal, or that any “real” person she encounters might not recognize her experiences for what they actually are, is something that I find it really terrifying in a personal way.
There’s some material late in the episode that’s objectionable not so much because it’s violent and scary, but more because it mimics the threats and violence that often occur alongside a sexual assault. Once it’s clear that he’s not a helper but a threat, Danny’s M.O. becomes trapping Rachel, grabbing and pinning her in place with his body, and exerting physical power over her. He dehumanizes her by reducing her to the body parts he wants (her eyes). Eventually she pulls within herself and deadens her reactions, almost turning into a doll – a response that’s a common defense to this kind of threat. Once her physical resistance is exhausted it’s her mind that seek to protect itself. This might be the most unsettling part of the episode and I’m still trying to decide whether or not it was necessary or successful, but I thought it was definitely worth mentioning.
This is definitely not an episode for everyone because I believe the “horror” aspect of the show is very specifically honed to individuals with certain experiences and tastes. To be honest, I still don’t even know whether I’d say I enjoyed it or not. It’s certainly got me interested, though, and I actually went and purchased the game for when I feel like exploring the similarities and differences between the two. If you’re someone who enjoys psychological horror and can tolerate some over-acting, this might be up your alley.
Pros: The episode cultivates a very specific kind of atmospheric creepiness that can be very effective. The dreamlike atmosphere is good at catching the viewer off guard.
Cons: The doctor’s threats and Rachel’s reaction in the second half of the episode mimic what occurs during a sexual assault. There’s a lot going on in this episode and not all of it is successful.
Grade: B-