By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Yuta Shimotsu’s New Group is a strange horror satire that, despite a clever premise and interesting imagery, doesn’t quite clear the final hurdle. Still, its originality is something to be celebrated, and it does, to Shimotsu’s credit, leave you with something to think about once the credits have rolled.
Ai ( Anna Yamada), is a high school student who is struggling to fit in with the rest of her classmates. One day Ai witnesses something truly bizarre when people in her school start to form a mass human pyramid. Before she can find an adult in a position of authority to help, she finds that the school’s various teachers have also been engulfed into forming human pyramids, leaving her and fellow misfit Yuu, a transfer student, being the only ones able to stop the phenomenon before it takes over the entire town.
New Group is an Invasion Of The Body Snatchers style satire of the conformist nature of Japanese society. In a country where the phrase “ the nail that sticks out gets stuck down” is still engrained into public life, Shimotsu’s script draws its horror from tacitly accepted mass conformity at the expense of the individual.
Shimotsu uses odd camera angles to create a strange and surreal atmosphere, which he juxtaposes with the mundane environment of a small suburban town where the story takes place. The ordinariness of the setting, makes the horror more effective using the time honoured technique of presenting familiar environments to the audience and then twisting them into something sinister.
The biggest flaw when it comes to New Group, however, is the movie’s length. Running at an hour and 22 minutes, it doesn’t have enough time to breathe and fully develop the two protagonists to the extent that it needs, as a result the third act feels rushed and stitched together when compared with the beginning and middle. Unfortunately this is what stops me from liking this film as much as I wanted to, with the pacing taking me out of the immersion that Shimotsu had spent time building. Overall while there are interesting things about New Group thematically, a rushed third act and assorted pacing issues hold what could have been a great horror movie back from reaching its true potential.
New Group screened as part of Overlook Film Festival 2026.
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