A cult-like mentality spreads through a Japanese high school, causing students to form human pyramids.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Yûta Shimotsu
Starring: Yuzu Aoki, Pierre Taki, Anna Yamada
Japanese filmmaker Yûta Shimotsu made an impressive debut with 2025's Best Wishes to All. That film used a Takashi Miike-style horror premise to fashion a cogent allegory for the collective guilt of the first world. With his follow-up, New Group, Shimotsu delivers another allegory, this time regarding the loss of individuality in Japan's regimented society. But this time Shimotsu beats us over the head with the idea, refusing to allow his film's striking central image to speak for itself.
That image is of a giant human pyramid made of school pupils, all dressed in identical uniforms. As seen on the film's poster, it's certainly a concept that draws you in, but once introduced the film does nothing interesting with the image beyond making you note how it's something you haven't seen before.
The movie is centred on shy high schooler Ai (Anna Yamada), who has a troubled home life. Her parents seem to speak at her rather than with her, and the root of the familial discomfort will later be revealed in a flashback that is more tasteless than disturbing. Ai is obsessed with fitting in at school, always agreeing with the consensus. The opposite is true of Yu (Yuzu Aoki), the new transfer student who has spent time abroad and now finds Japan's school system stifling. We get glimpses of how Japanese schools crush individuality as Ai is admonished by an art teacher for failing to draw a still life as it exists rather than how she interprets it, and a boy is physically punished for stepping out of line during a gym class that amounts to a military drill.
Falling for Yu, Ai begins to embrace his rugged individuality, which will be tested when a mysterious signal from outer space begins to take effect on the citizens of Japan. Madness takes over the streets: a celebrity couple are beaten by paparazzi; a politician yells "Japan is the best" as he marches through alleyways demanding that the homeless give him their votes; a group of schoolgirls stand by and film an elderly woman's heart attack. And in Ai and Yu's school, their fellow pupils, along with faculty members, begin to mindlessly form the aforementioned human pyramid.
At barely 80 minutes, New Group falls somewhere between an overlong short and a feature that doesn't have time to fully explore its ideas. It probably would have been more successful as a short, one that plants its ideas in our heads and lets us fill in the blanks ourselves. But Shimotsu doesn't seem to have any faith in the audience's ability to understand his film's central metaphor. Subtext bleeds over into text as the sci-fi absurdism intermingles with real world examples of mob mentality and group think. Shimotsu has little to say other than "individuality is good, conformity bad". New Group has all the youthful confidence and political shallowness of a Sex Pistols record.
For a while it's entertaining as a Japanese riff on high school horrors like Class of 1999, The Faculty and Disturbing Behaviour, as Ai and Yu (or "Yu and Ai"; see what he did there?) attempt to make it out of their school amid the mindless carnage. But as soon as Shimotsu moves his attention away from the school system and onto wider Japanese society his film falls apart. His notions on individuality and conformity are devoid of nuance, and will likely appeal most to impressionable teenagers or flat earth contrarians rather than anyone intelligent enough to understand that a healthy society requires a balance of individuality and conformity.
