Alice in Borderland Review

Shinsuke Sato wanted his take on Haro Aso's manga to play as one very long film, and the opening earns it. Kento Yamazaki's Arisu, a jobless gamer, hides in a Shibuya Station toilet with two friends and walks out into a Tokyo with nobody in it. The empty scramble crossing, mostly a green screen set far from the city, is an image that lingers. A playing card sets each game's type and difficulty, and a laser from the sky kills anyone whose visa runs out.

Sato stages the games with real invention, from tag through an apartment complex to a hide-and-seek in a botanical garden that only one player can survive, the show's most painful hour. Tao Tsuchiya's climber Usagi is a convincing action lead and Nijirō Murakami's smirking Chishiya steals every scene. The people are thinner than the puzzles: games stop for tearful flashbacks, the dialogue runs to speeches about the value of life, and the first season's stay at the Beach, a resort of players run like a cult, drags.

The second season, built on the face card games, is the peak. The third, six episodes in 2025 that Netflix calls the last, pulls Arisu back for a Joker round and plays like an encore after the song has ended; critics were far cooler.