New Group is a film that knows exactly what it wants its images to look like and is much less sure what it wants us to feel. Director Yûta Shimotsu orchestrates his groupthink set-pieces — students collapsing into multi-bodied pyramids, classrooms moving as a single pulsing organism — with genuine physical intelligence. The commitment to real bodies over digital shorthand pays off: there's weight, sweat, and danger in the stunts that no compositing pass can replicate. The premise is lean and efficient. Ai (Anna Yamada) is the perpetual outsider who has always tried to blend in; Yu (Yuzu Aoki) is the transfer student who refuses. Their high school begins strict and becomes something far stranger, with students surrendering individuality to a collective logic that is never fully explained and doesn't need to be. The eeriness is the point, not the mechanism. Where the film strains is in the relationship between those two leads. Shimotsu clearly understands that the social satire needs a human anchor — the system only means something if we care what it does to specific people — but Ai and Yu never generate the friction required to dramatize the film's thesis. You keep waiting for their dynamic to sharpen, for the conformist and the resister to genuinely threaten each other, and it doesn't happen. The comparison the review reaches for — the Ryder/Slater dynamic in Heathers — is actually the most useful diagnostic. Heathers works because the romantic tension and the ideological tension are the same tension. When Veronica is drawn to J.D., she is being drawn toward the very thing that will destroy her. New Group's protagonists lack that structural charge. Their relationship sits beside the horror rather than inside it. What Shimotsu does have is visual grammar. The human-pyramid choreography belongs in the same conversation as Zach Cregger's recent Resident Evil work — circus-trained bodies augmented sparingly with effects, the result feeling genuinely uncanny rather than computationally expensive. As a calling card for a second feature, these sequences are persuasive. The film is worth watching if you can tolerate a story that delivers on spectacle and withholds on character.
