New Group screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, 1 Nov 2025
New Group begins with a nightmarish montage: paparazzi hound – and beat – a celebrity couple (“die for our viewing figures!”, they exclaim); schoolgirls boast of their youth at a public fountain as they kick the elderly on the ground beneath them; and nationalist politicians gloat about the greatness of Japan and flash wads of cash as they trample over the homeless in the street. These three sequences all show facets of the same pack mentality – while also suggesting how readily such a mindset can become conventionalised and institutionalised, even when it leads to violence.
Ai Sato (Anna Yamada) is struggling with these very issues. She is a schoolgirl on the cusp of adulthood, seeking to define herself and to negotiate a pathway between her own individuality and the pressure to conform – and that pressure comes not just from peers like her best friend Haru or from gangs of bullies who enforce certain behaviours, but also from the staff. “There’s no room for individual expression,” a female teacher tells newcomer Yu Kobayashi (Yuzu Aoki) before tearing up the abstract, highly original portrait that he has sketched in her art class. Yu, who has come from abroad, is definitely a non-conformist in this most conformist of settings, and it is that characteristic of his, as well as his lack of parents, which draws Ai to him. After all, Ai’s own family may seem ordinary, but it too is broken in its own way, and Ai herself is able to see the aching fissures created by her parents’ attempts to keep up appearances.
At around the same time as news reports “mysterious signals” sent from space, Ai’s high school becomes the epicentre of a new phenomenon and a new social movement – even if it is really just a parody of all the old ones. The pupils – first just one, and soon many – start forming strange gymnastic formations in the school’s sports field, and then in its corridors. Far from discouraging these human pyramids, the headmaster and the gym teacher are soon spurring everyone to join in, and start, along with the participating pupils, to mete out acts of bloody punishment against those who refuse to become part of this strange new group. As Ai, Yu and a few others resist, the trend starts spreading throughout the city, dramatising the same dilemma – conform to the collective or rebel with one’s own individual integrity – that has been facing Ai all along. And in finding and recruiting people who share her aversion to this new group, Ai might just be creating another new group of her own.
The formations that these pupils – and eventually the adults too – create with their bodies mimic the organisational configurations that underlie family, school, work, politics, the media and the state, and as in writer/director Yûta Shimotsu’s debut feature Best Wishes To All (aka Best Regards to All, Mina ni sachi are, 2023), questions are raised about what it means to be included in. and indeed excluded from, such societal structures. So what starts as a film about a young girl’s coming of age, ends up anatomising and allegorising the hierarchies that shape the Japanese nation. Ai’s desperate bid to retain her individuality and not to be absorbed and objectified by the hive mind represent variants on the Bodysnatchers mythos – and both of Shimotsu’s films seem to suggest that there can be no real freedom from the country’s entrenched codes of conduct, and that the only escape from groupthink (of one kind or another) is an essential, utterly undesirable isolation or exile.
“Is it a horror or a comedy?”, Ai’s mother asks Ai’s little sister Kokoro near the beginning of New Group. Her words serve well as an introduction to the film itself, which blends bloody grotesquerie with surreal satire. One might equally ask if what happens here is real or all a dream, as Ai’s sleeping visions and waking experience keep getting confused, and as a strong streak of irrationality pervades the film’s events. Still, as the mother adds, accurately: “Whatever it is, it will be fun.”
strap: Conform or die: Yûta Shimotsu’s coming-of-age horror satire tests how a schoolgirl’s individuality shapes up against society’s collective structures
© Anton Bitel
