The first thing that hits you is the visual language, Ufotable doesn't animate schoolgirl suicides, they choreograph them, frame by frame, making death look like the only logical answer to a question you don't understand yet. Shiki sees something in the world that everyone else is too alive to notice, and the film trusts you to piece together what that is from cryptic dialogue and impossible geometry. The story assumes you're already lost, which means you're solving a murder alongside someone who might be the murderer, and by the end you realize the building itself was never the real question.

In September 1998, a string of eerily similar suicides grips a city. Young women are leaping to their deaths from the Fujou Building, a skyscraper due for demolition, and what links the victims remains unclear. Shiki Ryougi, a cold girl who lives in a bare apartment, suspects the deaths have a supernatural cause. Holding a mystical power of her own, she looks into the incidents with Touko Aozaki, a detective and doll maker versed in magic, and her friend Mikiya Kokotou, who works as Touko's assistant. The film is a supernatural mystery thriller with action.