It makes you sit with the fact that the apocalypse is boring, and that's exactly why it wrecks you. Zenshou spent its runtime letting Kadode and Ontan doomscroll alien sightings between cram sessions, treating the mothership parked over Tokyo like weather; Koushou is where the bill comes due and the joke stops being funny. Asano's Tokyo is still rendered with that unnerving photoreal precision, every convenience store and overpass drawn like a place you've actually stood, so when the frame goes wide on the ship you feel the scale in your stomach. The comedy never softens either, Ontan's deadpan bits landing right next to the SDF's flailing attempts to shoot down something conventional weapons can't touch. What gets you is how small it stays: two girls, one friendship, college entrance exams that still somehow matter. You'll finish it and text the person you'd want next to you.

Koushou is the second film in the Dead Dead Demon's Dededededestruction duology, following Zenshou. The first film introduced Kadode Koyama and her best friend, who follow the aliens' movements on social media while half-heartedly studying for college entrance exams, as Japan's Self-Defense Forces search for a way to fight an alien threat that ordinary weapons cannot touch. The film continues that story, mixing comedy, drama, science fiction and slice-of-life moments with everyday life under the shadow of the end of the world.