Pupa doesn't scare you, it makes you complicit. Twelve episodes at roughly four minutes each, and the thing they're building toward is a brother offering his own body as a meal so his sister doesn't have to hunt anyone else. Utsutsu regenerates, Yume eats, and the show frames that loop as love, which is the most genuinely upsetting idea here and the one nobody talks about because the black censor bars swallowed the visuals whole. The red butterfly, the cocoon, the father who broke them both long before any of this: the metaphor is right there, hunger as the language two abused kids use for each other. It goes nowhere, it's been compared to Human Centipede by people who dropped it at episode three, and it is still worth the forty minutes because that central image will not leave. Watch it as a ruin, not a horror show.

Utsutsu and Yume Hasegawa are siblings abandoned by their abusive parents, with only each other to rely on. When Yume encounters a crimson butterfly, a mysterious virus called Pupa takes hold, and her body transforms into a monstrous creature that hungers for human flesh. Utsutsu is only partly affected and gains the ability to regenerate. Bound by a promise he made to himself long ago, he is ready to give up everything to stay by his little sister, searching for a way to restore her while shielding others from her hunger. The short-format series blends drama, fantasy and psychological horror.