The CAPO police, in their body armor and glowing red eye-shields, look inhuman, like robots or demons. The real horror in Jin-Roh is the characters' suppression of their human feelings, to kill and betray in cold blood.

Tough, grim, silent, and friendless, Fuse seems an unsympathetic protagonist. But we see his human side at his first appearance, when he hesitates to shoot the terrorist girl he corners, giving her the chance to detonate her bomb. We see it when he broods over the dead girl, and when he befriends her sister. We see the two sides of Fuse in his dream, where he wanders the sewers with a pack of wolves. The wolves come upon a girl and tear her to pieces, ignoring Fuse's shouts to stop.

Everything melds together in this film. The animation is fluid and beautiful. The dark and muted color scheme combines with the realistic character designs to give the movie an atmosphere of hopelessness. The story twists and turns, conspiracies surrounding the main characters, pulling them to a fate that can not denied. And the eerie cello theme (composed by Hajime Mizuguchi, composer of Please Save My Earth) only adds to the melancholy.