Students and staff at a Japanese high school begin to exhibit strange and eccentric behaviours, marching in formation and compulsively forming elaborate human pyramids. Only a few isolated students seem to be immune, including the shy and withdrawn Ai (Anna Yamada) and new student Yu (Aoki Yuzu).

Shimotsu Yuta’s New Group ploughs a well-furrowed field in terms of Japanese horror cinema. His allegorical warning of the risks of conformity is going to feel immediately familiar to any regular viewers of the genre. It is palpably reminiscent of popular manga creator Ito Junji, particularly his extended work Uzumaki. In that book – adapted to a live-action film in 2000 by the mononymous Higuchinsky – a community inexplicably gets drawn into copying and expressing spiral-like patterns. Here it starts with an absurd sort of physical education and develops from there. The tension of becoming the only free-willed people left among a growing mass of self-similar cultists recalls another popular horror work: Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

Shimotsu expresses a good balance of tones, shifting elegantly from comedy to unsettling menace and back again. Moments of psychological horror are very effective when they occur, even if they are based in something audiences have seen many times before. There is also an openly satirical edge to New Group that criticizes and ridicules the more socially conservative side of Japan; it is not exactly insightful, but it rings with a certain honesty. Horror always seems to work best when it uses allegorical methods to address real world concerns, and that is certainly the case here.

It is interesting to see how Ai and Yu each resist the increasingly violent pressure to conform to a single behaviour. For Ai, engagingly played by Anna Yamada (Suicide Forest Village, 2021), her refusal to join the masses comes from a personal trauma that is teased out over the course of the film. For Yu it is borne of a long period of isolation in international schools in other countries. Aoki is decent in his role, although his character does feel a little bit under-developed. The protagonists’ names seem to have an interesting thematic touch: while Japanese, they clearly correspond phonetically in English to the singular “you” and “I”.

New Group is a tightly composed, urgent work, running a shade over 80 minutes. It is a smart creative choice, delivering increasingly surreal threats and set pieces without ever lingering too long or outstaying its welcome. It is an approach I appreciate: contemporary cinema seems too comfortable with long, languid running times, and often makes me crave a return to the 90-minute movie. Despite its limitations, and a broader reliance on familiar story beats and subject matter, New Group is an enjoyable – and enjoyably intriguing – contribution to Japan’s screen horror milieu.

New Group is streaming on Shudder from this Friday, 6 November 2026.