Conformity is the mind killer in Yuta Shimotsu’s debut comedy-horror.
“I wanna know what’s going on.”
As I sit in this Black Sheep Coffee I lift my cup and see, amusingly, the saucer has a motto printed on it. In massive black letters, it reads: Leave the Herd Behind. In my head I had imagined we’d left behind instead the Not Like Other Girls mindset (or has social media’s echo chambers and Main Characters only emphasised it?), but I suppose it’s partly ingrained to want to stand out and be our own person; a shining diamond in a sea of rough, samey lumps of coal. Apple is partly as successful as it is because it leaned so heavily on this, and based its entire early marketing campaign on the slogan Think Different.
Anyway, this is all to say that conformity has always been something of a bad guy in the creative arts, and I understand it. Sure, as a species we kind of needed to band together and form cohesive societies, which fuels our propensity for samethink. But that tedious monotony doesn’t make art, man. It doesn’t make us who we really are. And nowhere is this idea more brutally bashed into your head than in Yut Shimotsu’s truly cuckoo bananas New Group.
Ai Sato (Anna Yamada) is a teenage girl who doesn’t quite fit in. She is a perpetual outsider, not even noteworthy enough to bully. One typical day, her friend and potential love interest Yu (Yuzu Aoki) notices a boy in the school field, on his hands and knees, stock still. Over the following days, more and more students join in, creating a vast human pyramid, much to delight of the school principal (Pierre Taki).
When the students finally return to normal activity, none of them remember joining the great big pyramid, but things only get weirder as across Japan more and more people are performing synchronised gymnastics maneovers, assimilating those who won’t comply in the process. Like the Borg, but fleshier, and sillier.
Earlier I was being perhaps a bit unfair in my initial overview of New Group. It actually has loftier ambitions, calling out those who don’t think for themselves, live in echo chambers and regurgitate talking points on heavily-biased news channels and highly algorithmic social media posts. But ultimately it does just boil down to telling people that any sort of coordinated group is bad, and that to survive you have to be a free thinker. Make art! Speak your truth! And in a world where that attitude can spark wildly different results – from independent thought to “I did my own research on vaccines”, New Group often seems like it doesn’t know exactly who it’s satirising other than the general concept of conformity.
But, moving past all of this, what Shimotsu does is abandon subtlety for some extremely choice and creepy scenes. From the thumping heartbeat sound effect, to the music, to the haunting way people just move in sync in a bunch of shots, the film is so goddamn unsettling. The scene of the two groups of students forming death machines, like Cirque du Soliel performers is genuinely quite upsetting, and works to sell this idea of a world going mad via hive mind.
In order to even begin to sell this kind of story, the cast and director have to be in sync themselves, or the illusion entirely breaks down. New World does those scenes incredibly well, creating moments that are pretty harrowing in a vacuum, divorced from the film bashing you over the head with its Message Hammer. Shimotsu could dial back the comedy a bit, and the satire way down and I could see him create his very own Junji Ito-esque masterpiece. I’m a sucker for stories where people lose their free will, and act out of character, often destroying themselves in the process. The loss of independence is terrifying, and living in your own body, unable to scream will always trigger a primal fear in me. It’s why Amigara Fault is such a genuinely scary story. And why it works even here, the film where the main characters are called Yu, and Ai.
Verdict: On writing about it, I’ve turned around on this film. Perhaps it needs to be heavy handed to get across what it wants to. Add in some genuinely creepy moments, and New Group is a film that might not have been as good as I’d hoped, but definitely succeeds in what it wants to do.
New Group (2026)
Japanese
Director: Yuta Shimotsu
Writer: Yuta Shimotsu
Anna Yamada – Ai
Yuzu Aoki – Yu
Pierre Taki – Principal
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