Death Note poster

Death Note (2006)

Series · 22m episodes · Rated TV-14 · In Japanese

Animation, Anime, Fantasy, Foreign (non-English), Mystery, Sci-Fi

A brilliant student uses a supernatural notebook to purge evil, leading to a gritty, darkly-comic game of cat and mouse.

Suspenseful and cerebral, with dark satire. A full-attention watch at a measured pace. Emotionally it is devastating.

Streaming on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, Hoopla (free), The Roku Channel (free), Fandango at Home (free) and 2 more.

Death Note parents guide

It stays inside its TV-14, with no sex or nudity and mild language.

Rated TV-14, but by what is on screen our estimate is fine from about 10.

Scare
Mildly scary
A few tense or eerie moments.
Jump scares
A couple
One or two sudden jolts.
Gore
Light gore
Some blood or injury, briefly.
Violence
Some violence
Some fighting or peril.
Sex and nudity
None noted
Language
Mild
Mild words like damn, hell or crap.

How we rate: an AI reads what is known about each title and tags it 0 to 3; we check the tags against a hand-rated set and correct them by hand when readers tell us. Estimates, not a scene-by-scene review. Spot a mistake? Tell us.

Three questions

Is Death Note scary?
Only a little. Death Note has a few tense moments, nothing that follows you to bed.
How gory is Death Note?
Light gore and some violence.
What is Death Note rated, and is it OK for kids?
Fine for most older kids. Rated TV-14, with no sex or nudity and mild language.

What is Death Note about?

Light Yagami is an ace student with great prospects—and he’s bored out of his mind. But all that changes when he finds the Death Note, a notebook dropped by a rogue Shinigami death god. Any human whose name is written in the notebook dies, and Light has vowed to use the power of the Death Note to rid the world of evil. But will Light succeed in his noble goal, or will the Death Note turn him into the very thing he fights against?

Does it have a happy ending? (spoiler-safe)

It leaves the ending open to interpretation.

Cast and crew

StarringMamoru Miyano, Kappei Yamaguchi, Shidou Nakamura, Aya Hirano, Noriko Hidaka, Nozomu Sasaki

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Uses the TMDB API; not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Intensity, content, tone and pace tags are CouchRot's own.