Final Rating: 4/5
All You Need is Kill, directed by Ken’ichirô Akimoto, opens with an alarm going off at 7:03 AM. Rita (Ai Mikami) works a boring job trimming the roots of an enormous alien plant known as “Darol.” One year after its arrival, Darol has become the subject of research and worldwide fascination, but has remained benign… until today. During Rita’s shift, a group of monstrous creatures suddenly emerge from Darol, killing all her coworkers, and finally her, in a flash of red light.
All You Need is Kill opens with an alarm going off at 7:03 AM. Rita (Ai Mikami) works a boring job trimming the roots of an enormous alien plant known as “Darol.” One year after its arrival, Darol has become the subject of research and worldwide fascination, but has remained benign… until today. During Rita’s shift, a group of monstrous creatures suddenly emerge from Darol, killing all her coworkers, and finally her.
All You Need is Kill opens with an alarm going off at 7:03 AM. Rita (Ai Mikami) smashes her alarm after dying twice, realizing that the previous two fatal incidents weren’t dreams. Somehow, Darol has trapped Rita in a time loop.
From there, the formula is well-known to anyone familiar with time loop movies from Groundhog Day to Palm Springs. Live. Die. Repeat.
As Rita relives the same day over and over, she becomes increasingly skilled as a fighter, while gaining supernatural knowledge of her surroundings. In every loop, Rita experiments with different ways to thwart the attack and save her co-workers: fighting different enemies, working at different areas, using different weapons. All to the same result.
As she takes in the ambient conversations of everyone around her, her annoyance at the beginning of each day only serves to further alienate the already-socially awkward Rita from her peers. More than once, someone she just saved the previous night – for her – starts the day sneering at her with a mix of confusion and condescension. Even through constant self-improvement, Rita’s situation refuses to improve.
All You Need Is Kill opens with an alarm going off at 7:03 AM. Elsewhere on the complex, an engineer named Keiji (Natsuki Hanae) relives the same day over and over. On his third day, he discovers that Rita is stuck in the same time loop and decides to help her from the shadows. Each day, he upgrades her exo-suit, puts out her preferred weapons, and analyzes her fights, looking for any clues to their shared situation. By the time the two meet 92 loops in, Keiji’s efforts have brought him no closer to an answer than Rita.
Kenichiro Akimoto’s debut feature is the second adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s 2004 novel of the same name, following Doug Liman’s 2014 film Edge of Tomorrow. But where Edge of Tomorrow features a worldwide battle with aliens for the survival of the Earth, Akimoto’s All You Need feels significantly more personal.
Rita and Keiji are both presented as outcasts, Rita the child of an abusive household, Keiji the victim of relentless bullying. As they repeat the day, their improvement as fighters is undeniable, but never felt as strongly as their failure to break the loop. There’s a hopelessness inherent to any time-loop story, and where it’s often merely a short stretch of the film, it forms the backbone of All You Need.
The abstract artstyle of All You Need Is Kill reflects its more personal tone. Even in the most crowded scenes, there are never that many people on screen. Instead, Rita and Keiji are most often in large, empty spaces just distinct enough to communicate continuity. On a few occasions, a zoomed out shot of the Earth will remind the audience Rita and Keiji are in Japan, but locations like the warehouse, bridge, observation deck, and Darol’s roots could be just about anywhere.
The film’s most emotional scenes do away with scenery altogether in favour of white and black voids, or backgrounds resembling a music visualizer.
At times, it seems like Rita and Keiji are the only ones in the world. But in a world with only two people, losing one is catastrophic. “I hoped that if the world changed, I might be able to change too,” Rita says to Keiji during a monologue late into the film, “but as I repeated today over and over with you, [I realized] if I change, the world will change. I’m the one who makes tomorrow.”
All You Need Is Kill was seen during the 2025 Fantasia Festival. Thank you to GKIDS for the screener.
