Review of Shadows House

This show starts out as something special. In a setup vaguely reminiscent of Haibane Renmei, the main character is 'born' into a society filled with supernatural mysteries and must learn her place within its hierarchy. Where Haibane did this with people falling out of the sky into a kind and nurturing environment, Shadows House has Emilico awaken as a 'living doll' who exists only to serve her shadow-faced mistress in a mansion filled with nobles obsessed with kicking each other down to advance their own status. Over the first five episodes, Emilico stumbles through this unforgiving environment, learning its rules, and encounteringthe strange powers and creatures at work around her. For those five episodes, this show is a solid 8/10, maybe a 9.

It doesn't last, unfortunately. At the mid-point of its 13-episode run, the pacing grinds to a halt while the characters spend the next five episodes wandering around a garden maze. After the show's initial setup of gothic supernatural mystery, this section feels like nothing so much as a shonen battle school exam, while various nefarious factions plot away in the background. I was not expecting to be making comparisons to Naruto or Bleach when this show started, and the transition is every bit as jarring as that sounds. It develops the languid pace of those shows for a while too, despite it not having hundreds of episodes to burn.

Things improve somewhat once they're finally out of the garden maze, but by that point there's only three episodes left. I worried that we would never get answers to any of the story's many mysteries, but what ends up happening might be worse. In a painfully blunt piece of maid-and-butler dialogue, two of the villains just go ahead and tell the viewer the answers to almost everything. There's no slow, dramatic reveal. No shocking consequences. They just spell it all out for us like they're discussing the weather, and so it has no impact.

Meanwhile, Emilico and her mistress spend the final few episodes dealing with other problems. It seems like this will have lasting repercussions at first, but it all leads to a damp squib of a denouement that just returns everything to the previous status quo. It's a real shame to see a story with so much potential reduced to yet another glorified advert for an ongoing light novel series.