Despite the visuals being quite subpar overall, many of the images are striking in their own unique way, and there are enough grotesque and bizarre elements that left me intrigued enough to eventually give it a shot. Every once in a while all the right elements are there, and there's just a need for a skilled hand to pull it all together. But there actually isn't much to pull together in 75 minutes, with the last 20 or so minutes being overloaded with imagery, lots of half-baked ideas, and off the wall plot twists.
There's not much to spoil because the film is so incoherent and confusing... it's a psychological horror about a girl who was duped into living within a decaying apartment complex. There are plenty of twists and turns--experiments dating back to WWII, Mushishi-like bug creatures, a peculiar disease, a string of serial murders with an electric pizza cutter (I'm not even kidding...), etc. All of those elements build upon each other until you end up cringing at the idea of "dead soul soldiers" and falling off the deep end of a hallucinogenic death trip... I guess?
It actually starts off well enough; despite the low frame-rate of the animation and some very poor CGI, it manages to maintain a surprising amount of visual flair and atmosphere through well-chosen shots, filters, lighting, camera movement, vignettes, creative editing, etc. With its heavy dose of insect imagery, it comes across quite similarly to the quasi-surrealism and dream logic of the odder giallos--perhaps Argento's Phenomena, which involves the supernatural element of a young girl communing with insects to thwart a serial killer.
Aragne is far more convoluted, and though it starts as what seems like a pretty cliche horror thriller, it goes into the deepest depths of psychological horror by the end. It might be a head trip, but the ending segment is the equivalent of a person committing a really confusing dream to fiction without any sense of direction or good writing. Most of what happens has to be read in a rather symbolic manner rather than a literal one, but this is not well-crafted subtlety or complexity—there's just not enough depth or characterization for any of it to amount to anything.
I'm not going to even attempt to explain it, and it doesn't even matter, since you shouldn't watch it, anyway. If you watched it and are looking to understand it better... there is a prequel coming out called Amrita no Kyouen, which might clear up most of it, but if the low quality of this production is any indication, it's simply not worth the extra time investment.
