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.