Undead Murder Farce

Episode 9

It does the heart good to see an entire rural village worked up into a frenzy, brandishing torches and pitchforks as they chase an outcast through the woods. Don't get me wrong, the opening of this week's episode is tragic and nothing but sympathetic to the runaway werewolf and her ward Jutte; the villagers' hate and thirst for blood is by far the most monstrous component of this scene. It's been so long since I've last seen that cliché dispensed so plainly. Sometimes, it's nice to play the hits.

Per usual, this new arc of Undead Murder Farce kicks off strongly with an episode that wastes little time familiarizing us with the rustic German setting of our headless heroine's latest mystery to solve. It's also a step back from the ensemble-heavy antics of the previous case, and I like that contrast a lot. We get more idle banter between Aya and Tsugaru (and Shizuku, although her contributions tend to be more non-verbal and pro-violent), and the narrative spends more time on the minutiae of their initial investigations into these murders. The London chaos was fun in its messy way, but the sharper focus on playfully acerbic dialogue is a friendly reminder of how charming and perfect a throuple our central trio makes. The best fictional relationships are those where each party is a hair's breadth away from committing manslaughter.

Speaking of slaughter, the grisly and presumably werewolf-perpetrated murders have the entire town of Heulendorf on edge. It makes it extra funny when Tsugaru saunters up to the townspeople and shows them a talking severed head. His brazen and theatrical lack of tact is another quality that makes him so lovable. Aya also gets a great moment where she smugly stares down a shotgun barrel. As viewers, we know she's in no danger of being hurt by an ordinary weapon, but this show of fortitude helps impress her qualifications onto the skittish townsfolk. I assume that some of the villagers are made nervous by her paranormal appearance, and some are made nervous because they're werewolves in disguise.

Given the episode's prologue, the obvious conclusion would be that Jutte or someone else is committing these murders to avenge the mother werewolf. However, because that's the obvious conclusion, I expect the series to throw some appropriately farcical twists into there. At least Aya seems to have a pretty good grasp of the situation well before she gets to examine Louise's room. Note how she asks, seemingly out of the blue, whether it was raining last night, which is literally a move Columbo pulls in an early episode. Whenever he asks a question like that, it clues the audience in that he's already solved the case, so we can presume the same of Aya.

In the case of Louise's disappearance, Aya's inquiries and experiments point to the conclusion that the girl's abduction by a werewolf was an elaborately staged farce. Besides the clues she spells out loud, the window debris being exclusively outside the house removes that as a point of entry, as does the pillow test with the chimney. If the perpetrator had entered there, it would have covered the entire floor in soot, when in reality, only the pawprints themselves were dirty. This means Louise either let the werewolf in through the other window or she is a werewolf who made her escape look like an abduction. Recall the episode had earlier made a point (by way of turning Tsugaru into a furry) of emphasizing the difference in physical abilities between a werewolf's different forms, so the human Louise, who uses a wheelchair, would probably be able to move freely transformed into a wolf or therianthrope.

Another curiosity is why the victims were all young girls. Again, it makes sense if the motive is vengeance on behalf of Jutte or her mother, but that still strikes me as too obvious. Perhaps they, too, were secret werewolves staging their escape out of the village. The identical bite marks could be from a familiar ally helping them out of there. Plus, I like the multiple werewolves theory because it aligns more with what Undead Murder Farce would do with the subject—turning the village's werewolf paranoia into a literal game of Werewolf.

While we ponder the solution, the adaptation continues to be visually inventive. I love seeing the cast briefly superimposed onto an imaginary rakugo performance, which is both a fun way to deliver important werewolf lore and an adorable nod to Hatakeyama's prior role directing Shōwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū. The werewolf silhouettes over the psychedelic background look nice and trippy, like something out of an experimental '70s horror film. And on that note, I respect the awkward approximations of a split diopter shot, which is a technique Brian De Palma was a noted proponent of. There's an inherent absurdity in replicating that camera effect in animation, and that's precisely the kind of absurdity I want out of this series and this adaptation.

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Undead Murder Farce is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

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