Yûta Shimotsu's (Best Wishes to All) New Group is about as subtle as a sledgehammer with its metaphors for conformity and the erasure of individuality in Japanese society.
But subtlety isn't really the point. What the film lacks in nuance, it more than makes up for in sheer audacity and the increasingly gut-wrenching ways it drives those ideas home.
New Group opens with a mysterious signal beaming from space toward Earth before throwing us into one of anime's most enduring tropes: the arrival of the mysterious high school transfer student. Kobayashi (Yuzu Aoki) has returned to Japan after a few years abroad in New York and now shares a class with the timid Ai (Anna Yamada). Unlike his new classmates, Kobayashi has no qualms about marching to the beat of his own drum, while Ai is caught between her desire to think for herself and her fear of attracting the attention of the class bullies.
See, there's an old Japanese proverb that sums up the film's central thesis in a nutshell: 出る杭は打たれる (deru kui wa utareru), or "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." New Group takes that idea and runs with it to some truly batshit crazy extremes.
The film initially plays like a fairly traditional slice-of-life anime or J-drama, following the everyday rhythms of high school life--that is, until something very mundane yet strange happens in a field behind the school. In a very Junji Ito-esque development, a group of students form a human pyramid, and while their classmates and teachers initially brush off the bizarre spectacle, the students remain frozen in formation for hours, drawing some concern. When a police officer arrives to investigate, he promptly joins them.
Then the principal announces that ALL students and faculty must join the pyramid, and hundreds of teens and adults dutifully fall in line. Everyone, that is, except Ai, Kobayashi, and two other students, who are then hunted by their classmates.
From there, the film takes its already pointed metaphor for conformity and cranks it into a surreal nightmare that morphs into a new flavor of body horror. All the while, it weaves in a young romance between its two leads and a tragic backstory that helps explain Ai's newfound determination to become a leader rather than a follower.
New Group's obsession with gymnastics and the formations students craft with their bodies is an intriguing, low-fi yet wholly unsettling spin on the body horror subgenre. Students contort and freeze in various positions and configurations that are purely performative in nature, further leaning into the idea of trying to craft yourself into something you're not. Coupled with the performances by Anna Yamada and Yuzu Aoki, these sequences really sell not only the eerie beginnings but also the film's bigger swings as more and more people join in on this new trend, all while the budget remains modest.
I also think that once the film finally unpacks the origins of Ai's trauma and her issues with her parents, it manages to establish some surprisingly emotional stakes and motivation. While refusing to follow the crowd and trying to avoid the crazy conformists is one thing, understanding Ai's backstory gives her character a real depth.
New Group is a chilling portrait of Japanese society that also functions as an inventive and profound take on body horror. Yûta Shimotsu not only puts forth an intriguing metaphor for Japanese society but also a rather dramatically charged argument against its conformity. It's something that helps round out the weird human pyramid plot thread and the romantic entanglement in a way that adds some real emotional weight to the final act.
New Group could be one of the most original and authentic Japanese horror films in a few years, while also being one of the strangest.
The film hits Shudder this Friday, November 6.