Uzumaki (2024) Ending, Explained

The 2024 Uzumaki anime ends with the town lost to the spiral and the curse set to begin again. In the fourth and final episode, the survivors live in ruins battered by whirlwinds, the town rebuilds itself into one enormous spiral row house, and the last reveal is that the town sits over a mysterious, likely ancient entity and is doomed to repeat the curse whenever it is modernized. A post-credits scene shows the next Shuichi and Kirie. This page covers the ending in full.

Source for this page: Anime News Network's episode reviews of the four-episode series by Lynzee Loveridge, especially her episode 4 review, which is the only account of the finale we rely on. We have not watched the episodes for this page, and the manga's ending is not compared here.

How the series got to its last episode

Adult Swim's adaptation, directed by Hiroshi Nagahama with Production I.G, was planned as four episodes; Loveridge's episode 1 review notes it was pushed back several times by the effects of COVID-19 and that the first episode covers manga chapters 1 to 3. It also flags the problem that runs through the series: the manga is “well over 600 pages long,” and the anime has a runtime of roughly 100 minutes.

The production changed partway through. In her episode 2 review, Loveridge reports that Nagahama is no longer credited as director from that episode on, replaced by Yūji Moriyama, and that the episode was very obviously outsourced. Episode 3, per her review, combines the end of chapter 2 with elements of chapters 10 to 13, including the mosquito and umbilical-cord stories, and leaves Kirie, Shuichi and her family sheltering in one of the town's long houses as a typhoon arrives.

The last episode

Episode 4 brings in an outsider, the newscaster Chie, the only surviving member of a news team sent to find out what is happening. Loveridge describes a town in ruins where the slightest disturbance summons whirlwinds, a gang of delinquents “ride” the winds to destroy what is left, and the only safe places are row houses built near Dragonfly Pond, “itself a giant whirlpool.” People turn into giant snails, and the surviving townspeople eat them.

Kirie, Chie, Shuichi and Mitsuo try to escape over the mountain and fail. That trip is the episode's first time jump: the group comes back without Mitsuo to find the town rebuilt into “a giant spiral rowhouse” populated by humanoid masses that keep rebuilding it. Chie is left behind when she cannot get out of a row house before its inhabitants board up the exit.

What the ending reveals

The episode closes, in Loveridge's words, on “the big reveal that Kurozou-cho is built over a mysterious, likely ancient entity and is doomed to repeat its spiral-fixated curse whenever it becomes modernized again.” She adds that “The former inhabitants all perish, leaving no one behind to warn the next generation.”

The post-credits scene is the part viewers argued about. Loveridge describes it as showing “the next Shuichi-Kirie couple,” and notes that other sites claimed it recontextualizes everything. She disagrees: confirmation that the curse repeats “is hardly revolutionary. It's baked into the imagery.”

What to make of it

Loveridge's verdict on the series is harsh. She calls the episode a general improvement on episodes 2 and 3, passable “in no small part because the narrative is far more focused,” but her conclusion is that there is a version of Uzumaki that would have worked, “but it's unlikely to ever exist.”

Our reading: an ending about a curse that repeats is the right shape for a story built from a shape that never closes, and the post-credits couple turns the whole series into one turn of a loop rather than a story with an end. Whether the anime earns that ending after compressing so much is a separate question, and on ANN's account it mostly does not. That is our interpretation, not a statement from Junji Ito or the production.

VIZ collects the complete manga in one hardcover; see the Uzumaki catalog page. Uzumaki: seeing spirals before alarm looks at how the story builds its dread.