New Group review – schoolkids build human pyramids in bizarre Japanese horror-satire on conformity

Two outsider students at a super-strict high school find they are definitely not with the programme in Yûta Shimotsu’s body-bending sci-fi scarer

Here is an intermittently amusing Japanese social satire about conformity directed by Yûta Shimotsu; it has flashes of brilliance but lacks the kind of engaging characters that could have taken it to the next level. Ai (Anna Yamada) is an unpopular pupil who has always tried to fit in, and Yu (Yuzu Aoki) is a transfer student who more deliberately resists the demands of peer pressure. Their high school is super-strict at a baseline level – and when things start to degenerate, with students forming themselves into human pyramids and turning into mindless drones, it becomes clear something extremely peculiar is at work.

Fans of The Faculty, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Williamson’s 1998 high-school riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, might be pricking up their ears at this point, but New Group is a less straightforward narrative than the American film, prioritising eeriness and mystery over fun and games. It gets full marks for what you might call its groupthink set-pieces: students acting en masse as a giant, many-celled organism. Some of the choreography and image-making here is fantastic: as with Zach Cregger’s recent Resident Evil, in which multi-limbed crazy mutants are performed by human dancers and acrobats with circus-style skills, then augmented with a smattering of FX, the focus here is the human body as the basis for the memorable stunts. CGI has clearly been used too, but is not the be-all-and-end-all, and this makes a difference: there’s a tangible sense of bodies on the line.

What’s less substantial are the main characters: at certain points you expect their dynamic to take on a punchier form. Something with a flavour of the central romance in Heathers between Winona Ryder’s would-be iconoclast and Christian Slater’s misanthropic new student could have really helped New Group become a high-school horror classic, but Shimotsu (whose second feature this is) is evidently a talent to watch.