It drops you in a town where feeling anything literally cracks you open, then dares you to feel anyway. Mifuse is frozen mid-winter after the steelworks blew, nobody ages, nobody changes, and when a resident's heart moves too much, fissures spread across their skin until the Sacred Machine patches them back to normal. Masamune keeps sketching in secret because his drawings are the only thing in town still allowed to change, and Mutsumi walks him into the fifth furnace to meet a girl who eats with her hands and howls like a wolf. Mari Okada writes teenage want with zero embarrassment, sweaty and petty and unflattering, and MAPPA renders it in snow, rust, and furnace-glow that earns every frame. It stacks up more ideas than it resolves, which is exactly why people bail. The ones who don't are still hearing Masamune say the name Itsumi.

A town sealed shut by catastrophe, where time has stopped and change is forbidden. After an explosion at the local steel mill cut off every way out, fourteen-year-old Masamune drifts through gloomy, unchanging days alongside everyone else, waiting for a normalcy that may never return. When his enigmatic classmate Mutsumi leads him to the mill's fifth furnace, he meets Itsumi, a girl who cannot speak and behaves like a wild wolf. The meeting of these three upsets the fragile balance of their world. The pent-up urge of restless young people to fall in love begins to tear that world apart. Love becomes dangerous, transformative, destructive. A haunting romance wrapped in supernatural dread.