This Monster Wants to Eat Me

The Weight of the Water

There is a sick, twisted irony at the center of *This Monster Wants to Eat Me*, and I cannot quite get it out of my head. The setup sounds like a punchline for a particularly bleak joke: a severely depressed high schooler wants to die, and a beautiful mermaid offers to kill and eat her. The catch? The mermaid, Shiori, is a gourmet. She refuses to consume our protagonist, Hinako, until the girl is truly happy, completely healed, and entirely in love with life. So the monster essentially becomes a therapist, carefully nurturing a broken girl back to health solely so her meat will taste better.



Director Yūsuke Suzuki knows exactly how uncomfortable this premise is, and he does not let us off the hook. This 2025 adaptation of Sai Naekawa’s manga moves at a deliberate, agonizing crawl. (If you lack patience for slow-burn character studies, this will absolutely test you.) But the sluggish pace feels entirely intentional. Hinako is surviving day-to-day with massive survivor's guilt after a childhood car accident claimed her entire family, leaving her with physical scars she hides beneath long sleeves. The AV Club recently called the series a "pointedly uncomfortable horror anime," but the horror here is not jump scares or gore. It is the quiet, crushing weight of getting out of bed when you genuinely believe you shouldn't have survived.

I am particularly struck by how the show visualizes clinical depression. There is a brilliant sequence early on where Hinako is at school, forcing a smile and going through the motions with her energetic best friend, Miko. From the outside, she looks like any other anime teenager. Still, the moment Miko turns her back, the audio drops out. The background blurs, and the screen fills with the muffled, heavy sound of being underwater. You see Hinako physically slump, the invisible current pulling her down into the dark. We are not just told she is sad; we are forced to hold our breath with her.



What makes this machinery work so well is Reina Ueda's vocal performance as Hinako. Usually, anime protagonists in despair are loud about it—they scream, they cry, they monologize. Ueda makes a much braver choice. For the first few episodes, her voice is entirely drained of color. She sounds like someone who does not even have the spare calories to be angry. (In interviews, Ueda mentioned that Hinako's despair is so deep she simply lacks the energy to hold negative feelings.) It makes the contrast with Yui Ishikawa's Shiori so striking. Ishikawa gives the mermaid a breathy, ethereal tone that somehow manages to sound both nurturing and deeply predatory. When she softly tells Hinako, "I have come to eat you," it sounds dangerously like a lullaby.

I am not going to pretend the series is flawless. The middle stretch of its 13-episode run gets a little muddy, occasionally leaning too hard into standard high school tropes that clash with the grim psychological undertones. Sometimes a narrative detour just plays like stalling. Whether that structural wobble ruins the experience probably depends on how invested you are in the central dynamic.



Still, even when it stumbles, *This Monster Wants to Eat Me* manages to say something profoundly true about trauma. Healing is not linear, and sometimes the things that keep us alive are entirely irrational. Hinako only starts taking care of herself because she is promised a swift end once she does. It is a deeply messed-up motivation, yet watching her slowly, accidentally learn to care about tomorrow is quietly devastating. I have seen countless stories about monsters learning to be human, but I rarely see one about a human trying to remember why she shouldn't let the monster win.