Parasyte: The Maxim Review

The core relationship carries it. Migi is a good creation, coldly logical without being a villain, and Shinichi's gradual loss of affect, marked precisely by his inability to cry at a funeral, is the strongest thing in the adaptation. The horror craft is solid. Parasite transformations are animated as wet, jointless unfolding that stays disturbing because the show keeps the human bodies around them otherwise normal, and Tamura Reiko is one of the better antagonists in the genre because her project is curiosity rather than conquest.

What drags it down is tone management. The soundtrack drops dubstep and nu-metal over scenes that needed silence, converting dread into music-video energy again and again, and Madhouse's redesigns and smartphone-era updates give the show a glossy sheen that fights the material's clinical bleakness. The ecological speech in the final act states a theme the images had already made. Good adaptation choices and bad sonic ones, arriving somewhere noticeably less unnerving than its source.