By MICHAEL GINGOLD
Starring Anna Yamada, Yuzu Aoki and Pierre Taki
Directed by Yuta Shimotsu
Written by Yuta Shimotsu and Momoko Sahara
Kadokawa Corp.
It’s not often you find a genre movie containing truly original sights to freak you out, and one that makes them funny as well as shivery. Such a film is NEW GROUP, the second feature by Japanese writer/director Yuta Shimotsu, whose BEST WISHES TO ALL made its Shudder debut not long ago. It’s a most entertaining slice of weirdness, reminiscent of the oddities like UZUMAKI that popped up amidst the RINGU/JU-ON imitations of the early-21st-century J-horror trend, braced by an underpinning of social commentary that supports and enhances its bizarre visual and narrative pleasures.
A North American premiere at the current Fantasia International Film Festival (where it won a Special Jury Mention at the fest’s awards), NEW GROUP opens with a montage of violent and aggressive incidents whose connection isn’t clear at first but will be revealed as the film goes on. It then settles in with Ai (Anna Yamada), a typical if somewhat reserved high-school girl with a tense family life. She becomes intrigued by Yu Kobayashi (Yuzu Aoki), newly arrived in her class after spending some time in the United States, but he is initially dismissive of Ai, particularly after witnessing her watching some mean girls bullying another student and doing nothing to help. Yu’s time abroad has evidently encouraged his rebellion against the conformity that is status quo both at school, where the students bow in unison to their teachers and are led through military-style marches on the athletic field, and in Japanese society in general.
Then odd things begin to happen that take mass compliance to new levels. It begins with one boy taking a place on that field on all fours, unmoving. Then two other students join him, forming a small human pyramid that is initially, and amusingly, treated as a curious distraction. Then more of the student body begin crouching atop each other until the pyramid is towering over all observers, and the faculty is strongly encouraging everyone to take a place upon it. Only a handful of the kids, including Ai and Yu, resist, and the scenario becomes a kind of high-school variation on INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, though it quickly heads off in directions absolutely never explored in any screen version of that classic story.
Over the course of a swift 82 minutes, Shimotsu and co-scripter Momoko Sahara keep the twists and surprises coming, taking the audience into unexpected places that are both unsettlingly strange and blackly humorous. One lengthy, well-sustained setpiece employs bodies both in motion and unmoving to especially disquieting effect, incorporates a key character delivering an unusual statement of purpose and leads to a punchline that had the Fantasia audience applauding. The action eventually finds its way off the school grounds and into the surrounding city, where Shimotsu maintains the off-kilter tension while working in more salient, pointed observations about groupthink and the loss of individual identity. He even manages to work in a revelation about Ai’s family that feels more akin to typical modern J-horror tropes while still making it work in NEW GROUP’s very unusual context.
Yamada and Aoki are very good as the two leads, whose points of view are initially opposed but who find a common purpose in resisting the inexplicable behavior surrounding them. A highlight in the supporting cast is Pierre Taki as the school’s principal, who enthusiastically encourages his pupils’ loss of identity. (I wasn’t able to determine the name of the actress who plays the leader of the mean girls, but she makes a strong impression in a small amount of screen time.) With NEW GROUP, Shimotsu has tackled a theme specific to his home country in ways that make it relatable, and scary, to viewers anywhere. The English-language relevance of Ai and Yu’s names is just one reason NEW GROUP is likely to travel well internationally.
