Finally watched jujutsu kaisen 0. It's a bit of a mixed bag, like Yuta reveals his copy technique during his fight with geto after absolutely 0 scenes of him discovering he has it or how to use it. If you even remotely attempted to watch it as a standalone movie you would be lost and frustrated.
But as a prequel it's pretty good! Yuta is a sweetheart, his story with Rika is affecting and goes beyond the slightly fridge-y setup to tell a story about grief and trauma. I'm probably particularly forgiving of this since she gets to be a big cool scary curse instead of just dead-dead. And the fights look great.
But most of all I like how absolute and unshakeable the thematic duo of Yuta-Rika and Satoru-Sugeru is. It's the emotional core of the movie, these two people haunted by the loved ones they've lost. Satoru says it explicitly about halfway through the film, when he says love is the most terrible curse, and he gets flashbacks to Sugeru's philosophy and ideology from his younger days that mirrors Yuta thinking about Rika as a child. We don't hear the words he says to Sugeru before the latter dies, but it's super obvious from context that they amount to "I love you", and that too is an explicit connection to Yuta and Rika. And then the movie ends with Yuta freeing Rika and achieving some measure of closure, and with Satoru not getting that. Sugeru is dead but we know that corpse is going to come back, and the conflicting philosophies that haunt and weigh down all of sorcerer society but especially Satoru at its peak are the core of the story to come. He has no closure, and I don't know if he'll really get it until the actual end of jjk proper.
I'm sure losers out there like to quibble about whether Satoru's love for Sugeru is romantic, but I think the absolute analogy with Yuta and Rika makes that not even a question. It's a shame the story doesn't push it above the level of subtext, but I really don't think a savvy reader can understand it any other way.