Yûta Shimotsu turns the schoolyard human pyramid into a town-wide horror in NEW GROUP

In NEW GROUP a Japanese high school decides, as one body, to start forming a human pyramid in the gymnasium. The principal encourages it. The teachers encourage it. The formation does not stay inside the school. It spreads to the streets, the rooftops, the shop signs, the kind of public infrastructure that does not usually invite climbing. Yûta Shimotsu has built a horror picture out of this single image, and the picture’s argument is that Japanese conformity was already a religion before the gymnastic drill made it visible.

The film is short, eighty-two minutes, and what it does in that time is dramatize a body politic literally agreeing to climb on top of itself. Ai is a high school girl who has spent her whole upbringing feeling suffocated by social pressure and never quite figured out how to push back against the current. The transfer student Yuu is the only person in the town who reads as foreign to the formation, an outsider who has not yet learned the local syntax of compliance. Together, they are the holdout. The horror in NEW GROUP is not the pyramid itself; the horror is how easily the rest of the room agrees to climb.

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Anna Yamada plays Ai with the affect of a teenager trained for years not to be noticed; the role is built around what she does not do, the small refusal that registers only because the rest of the frame is already in motion. Yuzu Aoki plays Yuu as the foreign body, the one student whose discomfort with the drill cannot be rehearsed away. Pierre Taki is cast as the principal, and the casting choice is itself a reading the picture invites the audience to make. Taki has been rebuilding his presence in Japanese cinema after a public derailment, and Shimotsu hands him an authority role that asks the audience to see authority as something that can be possessed by an idea before it is exercised by a person.

Shimotsu’s break-out picture, his debut feature, was a quiet chamber horror that travelled the international festival circuit on the strength of its dread-as-suggestion register. It announced him as a director who can make a small frame feel infested, who can hold a camera on an ordinary domestic interior until something inside it gives way. NEW GROUP is the scaling argument. He is taking the dread he built inside a single apartment and pushing it out to a whole town, to a public square, to a skyline. Whether the technique survives the expansion is the question the picture is being asked to answer, and the answer is what the foreign reception so far has been arguing about.

What the film does structurally is convert kumitaiso, the schoolyard human-pyramid drill that has been a flashpoint of Japanese education policy for years now over the injuries it has produced and the discipline it has been used to enforce, into a horror engine. The drill is already a metaphor before any camera turns on. The film simply refuses to disavow what the drill is for. The structural pun NEW GROUP is built on is that the formation only holds if everyone agrees to climb, and the picture’s bet is that Japanese audiences will recognise the drill before they recognise it as horror, because they have already been inside it.

What NEW GROUP does not resolve, on the basis of its premise, is whether eighty-two minutes is enough to carry a single-image allegory all the way to a third act, or whether the picture would have held better at one-hour-of-television length. The international festival reception has been positive on the conceit and quieter on whether the conceit sustains. The film is also operating in a register where Japanese genre cinema has been crowded for the past several years; the Kiyoshi Kurosawa-school of social-allegory horror is now a recognisable export, and NEW GROUP arrives into a corner of the market where the bar for novelty has been raised by everything in front of it. Whether Shimotsu’s specific image — the pyramid, the rooftop, the body politic agreeing to assemble — is novel enough to break out of that corner is what the Japanese run will test.

The credited principals are Anna Yamada as Ai, Yuzu Aoki as Yuu, and Pierre Taki as the principal. The runtime is eighty-two minutes. The genre framing is horror, lean, and the picture sits inside the Japanese-language production tradition that has been carrying social-allegory genre work onto the festival circuit for the past several years. NEW GROUP is Yûta Shimotsu’s sophomore feature, the picture that confirms or breaks the case his debut made for him as a Japanese horror voice worth importing.

NEW GROUP opens in Japanese theatres on 12 June 2026, after a foreign rollout that has already moved through Korea, Hong Kong, Canada, Thailand, the United States, Taiwan, Belgium and Australia. The picture has reached most of its largest markets ahead of its home market — a release pattern that says something specific about how the international genre circuit has been routing Japanese horror, and that means the Japanese audience will see the film carrying the foreign reception with it.

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