Film Review: Demon City 鬼城殺 鬼ゴロシ (2025) - Japan
Reviewed by Andrew Chan (Film Critics Circle of Australia)
I rated it 8/10
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★
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There is a moment in Demon City when the camera lingers on Tōma Ikuta’s face—blood-streaked, eyes burning with a fury that has simmered for twelve long years—and you feel the weight of every ghost that haunts him. This is not mere vengeance porn, though the film delivers carnage with visceral relish. It is a meditation on loss, resurrection, and the demons we both flee and become. For a pulpy revenge thriller adapted from manga, Demon City carries surprising emotional gravity.
The story is elemental in its simplicity, yet executed with the precision of a master swordsman. Shuhei Sakata (Ikuta), a legendary hitman, dares to dream of retirement and family. One terrible night, masked intruders shatter that dream, murdering his wife and daughter before his eyes and leaving him for dead—framed for the very crime that destroyed him. Coma claims the next dozen years. When Sakata awakens, the city he once navigated as a shadow has been remade by the very “demons” who took everything. What follows is a rampage of righteous wrath, but one laced with unexpected tenderness and revelation.
Ikuta inhabits Sakata with a physical commitment that borders on the superhuman. Watch the way he moves—initially fragile, then increasingly fluid and terrifying, like a man remembering he was once a weapon forged in hell. There is poetry in his violence: each strike feels earned, not gratuitous. The supporting cast, particularly the actors behind the oni masks, bring menace and humanity in equal measure. The film understands that true evil often wears the most ordinary faces once the masks come off.
Director Seiji Tanaka stages the action with muscular confidence. Fight sequences crackle with inventive brutality—blades, fists, and improvised weapons deployed in tight, rain-slicked spaces that recall the neon-drenched intensity of classic Asian action cinema while carving out their own identity. The sound design is gloriously grotesque (that recurring “squelch” will live rent-free in your head), and the score swells with rock-infused grandeur that elevates the proceedings from exploitation to something approaching mythic. Yet Tanaka never loses sight of the human cost. Quiet moments between bursts of mayhem—Sakata confronting the ruins of his life—give the film a soul that lesser revenge tales often discard.
What elevates Demon City beyond its genre brethren is its subtle engagement with themes of legacy, forgiveness, and the corrosive nature of power. In a city being sold as a glittering future, the past refuses to stay buried. Sakata’s journey forces us to ask: when everything is taken, what remains? Is revenge redemption, or merely another mask? The film doesn’t preach, but it lingers on these questions long enough to resonate.
Flaws exist. The plot occasionally follows familiar beats a touch too predictably, and some supporting threads could have been trimmed for even greater momentum. Yet these are minor quibbles in a film that knows exactly what it is and executes with bloody-minded conviction.
Demon City is the kind of movie that reminds us why we love cinema’s darker corners: not for cheap thrills alone, but for the primal catharsis of watching a broken man reassemble himself through fire. It is stylish, savage, and strangely moving. Highly recommended for anyone who appreciates action cinema with heart beneath the splatter. (Neo, 2026)