New Group Is Hard to Describe. We’ll Try Anyway.

A deep cut, perhaps, but it’s hard to not think about Katamari Damacy while watching New Group. The 2004 cult-classic PS2 puzzle game revolves (sorry) around a tiny extraterrestrial prince who rolls an absurdly sticky ball around a stylized version of Japan, taking random objects and jamming them together until the resulting ball of junk is big enough to destroy the planet. Yûta Shimotsu’s second feature is based on a similar premise, only in this case it’s high-school students creating bizarre “gymnastic formations” with their bodies that kicks off the movie’s Earth-swallowing chain of events. And it reaches similarly absurd heights, gaining momentum until a giant ball of human bodies is ramming into a human pyramid 20 layers tall.

First things first, however, the pyramid expands from four students randomly kneeling in the schoolyard to dozens, and eventually hundreds, marching in formation and leaping onto each others’ backs until the structure is taller than the building itself. This draws the attention of local news media, as well as crowds of gawkers whose reaction to this grotesque display is not to try to help those at the bottom of the pyramid, but to take a selfie.

This cynicism is typical of Shimotsu’s work: His first feature, Best Wishes to All (2023), was a more gruesome take on similar themes of toxic conformity. Here, however, the madness is contagious, as the onlookers start to combine into unsettling shapes of their own after gazing upon the sinister pyramid. At the center of it all is the dean of the school (Pierre Taki), a strict disciplinarian who may be possessed by some kind of alien entity. Or maybe not: It’s suggested at the beginning that an invasion might have occurred, but in Shimotsu’s world, humans are downright eager to be brainwashed even without any extraterrestrial influence.

New Group’s commentary isn’t subtle: The lead characters are named Ai (Anna Yamada) and Yu (Yuzu Aoki), for example. It is pervasive, however, critiquing Japanese society at all levels, from the familial — Ai’s parents are subject to a particularly morbid form of mind control — to the political. The film is uncanny and strange rather than actually frightening, taking a totally unhinged idea and carrying it, with complete deadpan sincerity, all the way to its surreal end point. At times, the effect is comedic — a scene where Taki’s character performs a freestyle rap about the joys of belonging to a group, for example — and sometimes it’s strangely unsettling.

Either way, New Group is wholly original, to the point where you sound a little unhinged trying to describe it. At times, it plays like a classic ‘50s sci-fi monster movie like The Blob or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as high-school misfits (and the only independent thinkers in the film) Ai and Yu run in fright from threats that might look silly from the outside, but are treated as deadly threats within the context of the film. The social-commentary element also means that New Group shares DNA with a vintage episode of The Twilight Zone, a series that was similarly concerned with social contagions and eerie, unexplained events.

At the same time, however, it’s something completely different, with visuals influenced by video games and a point of view that’s shaped by its creator’s own individualistic beliefs. Yûta Shimotsu is deeply disturbed by the relentless conformity of Japanese culture, to the extent that he’s made it the focus of his filmmaking career so far. And it’s because Shimotsu so earnestly believes in what he’s saying that New Group comes across as a horror movie, and not just an absurdist deadpan oddity. It’s that, too — it’s a lot of things, really. And all of them are unique.

New Group is now streaming on Shudder.