This movie throws you headfirst into a nightmare dressed up in politics and morality. From the very first episode, you feel it in your bones—this isn’t just going to be another crime-thriller anime. This is going to crawl under your skin, whisper questions you don’t want to hear, and leave you staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., wondering if you’ve been too comfortable with the idea of right and wrong. Watching Babylon felt like watching the ground disappear beneath me, one law, one choice, one human soul at a time.
It begins with Zen Seizaki, this straight-laced prosecutor who believes in the system, believes in justice, believes that if you just work hard enough, dig deep enough, the truth will come out clean. He is quick, tenacious, the type of a man you feel is capable of doing anything. However, as he begins to enquire into the pharmaceutical company conspiracy in the new independent state of Shiniki, the existing cracks start widening. What he falls over is not, as it were, corporate corruption, it is merely a window to something far more sinister, more existential.
Enter Ai Magase. God, Ai Magase. Unless there is a villain in anime who has ever stalked me in the same way she did, I cannot recall it. She is not a monster, tipped with claws, or a god, with powers, she is worse. She is gorgeous, she is self manipulative and she speaks in a manner that bends people. Men, women, people of power, people of faith--she whispers, and at that moment suicide seems the most natural, liberating thing to do. And it is horrifying to watch her at work, as she is not fighting with fists, she is fighting with words. and words are sharper than a knife.
This is what makes Babylon so uncivilized--it is not of action scenes or spectacular battles. It’s about ideas. The concept of suicide law, the notion that humans ought to be legally able to take their own lives should they want to. On the one hand, it is more like a discussion, a policy. The anime does not make it clean though. It brings it into blood and tears, politicians falling down under the burden of choice, whole societies shattering, children abandoned. And all this time Magase is there, like a phantom, smiling, pushing, prodding, pushing humanity to the brink.
One of the scenes that still messes with me is when that first politician kills himself after Magase gets to him. Watching a man who’s supposed to be untouchable, confident, collapse into despair—it wasn’t gore that shocked me. It was the silence after. The way death felt almost seductive, like she had stolen his will in plain sight. And then it kept happening, again and again. People you thought were strong, people you thought were safe, gone. And every time, Seizaki is left standing there, powerless, his faith in the law unraveling.
The worst of watching Babylon is that it continues to drag the carpet out beneath you. You think Seizaki has tracked Magase to the wall, or that the government has worked out a plan, but she escapes. And just as in that scene as Seizaki runs after her, desperate, angry, and she bends down and whispers that voice that melts steel--and you can see, in a moment, even him wavering. The man who was not to be moved, was nearly broken. It is then that you know: it is not a battle that can be won by evidence and trials. This is a war of souls.
And the Shiniki experiment the first state to legalize suicide--that arc was a gut punch flattened out across intervals. Initially, it is a political game, a gimmick. but you look at the results. You watch parents leaving kids behind, you watch the tally marks go up, you watch people giving up at such a fast rate when society informs them that being a desplicator is a choice just like any other. Death was not the worst thing as people died. It was its normalness, its acceptability. To see it happen was to peep in a mirror and see the darkest depths of human freedom.
Among the most memorable moments to me was when Seizaki makes a call to his wife, with a cracking voice, pleading with her to come and assure him, to hang on to him in the midst of all this insanity. and you know--Ai Magase has reached her as well. That moment gutted me. Since now the fight was not out there, in politics or law--but in his own home, in his own bed. And the horror of not only losing strangers, but of those who were nearest to you--then the subject of the story became morality in principle. It became personal.
The most annoying aspect of Babylon is that it does not provide you with clean answers. Usually, even when it is a dark thriller, there is the feeling of a resolution, you capture the villain, you prevent the propagation, you restart. But here? Magase never gets “caught.” The concept that she embodies--hopelessness in the form of freedom--never truly passes away. And Seizaki… The descent of God is one of the most gruesome sequences of the anime by Seizaki. When a man who thought in justice falls into obsession, grief, hopelessness,--it is like a light going out. At the end, he is not even fighting Magase anymore. He is battling himself, and battling the urge of despair, and you are not even certain whether he is winning.
This is an uncomfortable position put you in by the anime. No happy ending, no triumph of the hero. Just questions ringing in your ear. But are humans willing to have freedom? Or is it comfort, rules, something we want to keep us out of the burden of our own decisions? When suicide is made a right is it a liberty, or is it an exodus? And the worst part of it: when somebody like Magase whispers in your ear, can you work against it?
Babylon did not feel like entertainment and was more like peeking into a hole that was gazing back. It made me recall that our beliefs are so weak, and how thoughts can destroy civilizations so easily. And it was not the deaths that bothered me--it was the comfort. The silent manner in which individuals release, believing in some smile, a sentence, a whisper.
Babylon doesn’t just tell you a story—it dares you to question the foundation of morality, to stare at the line between choice and manipulation, freedom and destruction. And it doesn’t flinch.
That’s why I can’t forget it. Because it’s not about whether Seizaki “wins” or Magase “loses.” It’s about the fact that once you’ve heard her voice, once you’ve seen that world, you realize the fight between life and death, hope and despair, isn’t out there. It’s inside us. Always has been.
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