The score moves faster than the plot can follow, you're drowning in revelation while the orchestra refuses to let you surface. Ayato's entire world collapses in two hours, and the film trusts you to piece together what the TV series spent 26 episodes building, which means you're either lost or exhilarated depending on whether you've already watched it. This is a film made for people who lived with RahXephon, not people discovering it.

Ayato Kamina has spent three years in Tokyo, cut off from Haruka Mishima, the girl he loved, after an event that supposedly killed everyone outside the city. When invaders suddenly attack, he meets Haruka Shitow, an agent of an organization called TERRA, who promises to tell him the truth about the world. That meeting sets off a chain of strange events, among them Ayato activating a giant mecha called the RahXephon. Ayato learns that many people, his own mother among them, have blue blood, and that the Tokyo he calls home is a sealed dimension where time passes more slowly than in the world outside. The film is a psychological mecha drama that mixes science fiction, action and romance as Ayato faces the truth about the place he has been living.