Netflix’s Death Note is a book report by a kid who didn’t do the reading.
If you’re watching Netflix on a phone or a tablet, there’s a setting that lets you set the speed of video playback. It’s a repugnant reminder that Netflix views anything and everything as fungible, interchangeable content, devoid of any intrinsic value beyond keeping subscribers’ eyes glued to the screen. I mention it here because no matter what setting you’ve personally chosen, and no matter your familiarity with the source material, Netflix’s 2017 Death Note feels like a story told at an unalterable 1.5x normal speed. It’s a speed-run through the celebrated manga, a West Coast remix of a Japanese morality thriller that swaps existential dread for prom drama while also cramming in some Final Destination-style fatalities. The result is less an adaptation than an abridgement—aggressively streamlined, gleefully gory, and resigned to the necessity that thematic complexity is something only to be gestured at before cutting to someone’s head being flattened like a watermelon.
Light Turner (Nat Wolff) is a bright but disaffected teen whose life takes a sharp turn when he inherits a notebook with the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it. That power comes courtesy of Ryuk (voiced by Willem Dafoe), a sardonic death god who observes Light’s moral unravelling with amused detachment. Joined by classmate Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley), Light sets out to purge the world of criminals under the alias “Kira,” drawing the attention of the brilliant but erratic investigator L (Lakeith Stanfield).
To his credit, director Adam Wingard does attempt to do something with the poisoned chalice he’s been handed. This is a director who understands atmosphere and tension – The Guest and You’re Next didn’t earn their cult status by accident – but here he’s trapped between fidelity and functionality, with the meagre resources that Netflix (having rescued the production when Warner Bros. had one of their semi-regular production crises and put it into turnaround) were willing to provide. Tasked with boiling down Death Note’s intricate power plays, moral quagmires, and psychological cat-and-mouse theatrics into a tight runtime more suited to a disposable horror flick for a streamer then more interested in quantity of content rather than quality, it’s hardly surprising Wingard frequently defaults to the blunt force narrative grammar of the Final Destination films, where elaborate deaths take precedence over existential debates. The result is slick and stylish but fundamentally unsteady, like trying to build a moral philosophy thesis based on skimming through Chat-GPT summaries of first-year undergraduate Reddit threads about Nietzsche.
Light Turner (Nat Wolff) registers more as an outline than a character—defined less by a coherent arc than a series of reactive beats designed to usher the plot forward. Where the original Light Yagami was terrifyingly methodical—a proto-Moriarty drunk on divine power—this version seems perpetually one step behind his own actions, an anxious teenager whose arc revolves less around god-complex megalomania and more around whether he’s grounded. Wolff does what he can with the role, but the script keeps undercutting him, mistaking clumsy vulnerability for depth and assuming that panicking a lot counts as moral conflict.
Margaret Qualley’s Mia is an intriguing reinterpretation of Misa Amane, though one that again suffers from the film’s hyper-compressed approach. Her transformation from intrigued accomplice to bloodthirsty manipulator is impressively acted but chronologically baffling. A longer format might have given her descent room to percolate, but here she’s asked to leap narrative chasms like an emotional parkour artist. The performances across the board – Lakeith Stanfield’s twitchy, compelling L in particular – hint at lost potential struggling to get out. Stanfield in particular delivers a fascinating interpretation of the detective, all jagged, restless intensity and barely contained ego. He’s one of the few elements that seems to understand the story’s need for idiosyncratic weight, even if the film around him won’t let him carry it for long.
It doesn’t help that the screenplay keeps reaching for shortcuts. The battle of wits between Light and L, originally the festering heart of the story, is abandoned in favour of hasty reveals, interminable footraces, and escalating threats. The idea of a psychological duel devolves into diner tantrums and melodramatic ultimata. It’s not that the bones of the story aren’t there—they are—but they’ve been whittled down to a skeleton too flimsy to support the original’s thematic heft. Power corrupts, yes, but it also gets jump-scared by Ryuk and runs into a wall. Even the ubiquitous apple eating is treated as an Easter Egg for fans in the know and an inexplicable quirk to the uninitiated.
Ryuk himself (itself?), at least, remains glorious. Willem Dafoe doesn’t just lend his voice—he practically gift-wraps the film’s only consistently engaging presence. It’s a performance that reprises his Spider-Man Green Goblin at his most unhinged, then filters it through a noir-drenched goth fever dream. The result is a creature who crackles with malicious glee, delighting in the carnage like a demon watching a school science fair go explosively wrong. But even he isn’t immune to the film’s need for narrative expediency; the Death God who once stood as a chaotic neutral observer is now a cryptic instigator, shouting instructions and nudging events forward like a dungeon master losing patience with his players. He’s compellingly realised – more often glimpsed in silhouette or half-shadow rather than showcased outright – but Dafoe’s vocal presence mitigates the lack of screen time, anchoring the character with a sense of ghoulish amusement.
The irony, of course, is that Death Note was rebooted by Netflix, a platform practically built to deliver serialized storytelling. All the ingredients were here for a sharp, slow-burn series that could have dissected morality, power, and consequence with the nuance the original earned. Instead, the film feels like a binge-watch supercut of a show that never existed: all plot, no pause, perpetually in motion. It’s a film so focused on hitting key beats that it forgets to build connective tissue between them.
There’s craft in the chaos, though, even if it’s poorly served. The cast are game, the direction often stylish, and the concept as potent as ever. The tragedy is that it all unfolds too quickly and too shallowly to stick. Rather than interrogate the seductive appeal of absolute justice, it checks off the idea and turns the page to plot the next murder.
A name written in the Death Note is supposed to signal a definitive end, the permanent epitaph of someone who deserved to die. This version of Death Note feels more like a hasty reminder rendered in pencil, already halfway erased and the death of Netflix’s attempted adaptation is less death by notebook-guided Shinigami and more death by misfire. You have to know you missed the mark when The Simpsons’ Treehouse Of Horror version gets more right than you do.
