This Monster Wants to Eat Me Episodes 1 to 3 Review

This Monster Wants to Eat Me opens as a quiet, melancholy kind of story. It is easy to compare it to last season’s The Summer Hikaru Died, since both follow a withdrawn young person who befriends a same sex monster that cannot quite suppress its hunger for them. But where that show leaned into horror, this one plays more like a slow, sad underwater drama.

Slow and sorrowful really are the right words for these first three episodes. To enjoy them, you have to be willing to sit in the gloom, and while I happen to be on board with that mood, I can also see how easily it might wear on other viewers.

The writing is uneven. Some of its more flowery descriptions reach for a literary feel that subtlety might have served better. Yet elsewhere it shows real craft, especially in how it lets us piece together the tragedy that shaped Hinako, our lead, well before it is spelled out.

Long before the third episode confirms it, the show drops gentle clues, pairing messages about an anniversary with Hinako’s dread of summer and her fixation on water, so we can sense how and where she lost her family. The arrival of Shiori, who comes from the sea, deepens that symbolism, turning the ocean into an image of both death and longing.

What pulls me in most is the tangle of contradictory needs binding Hinako and Shiori together. It is patient, unspoken storytelling that leaves room to reflect. This Monster Wants to Eat Me is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

My take: This will not be for everyone, and that is fine. I have a real soft spot for slow, sad, strange little stories like this, and I am happy to wallow alongside Hinako for a while.