‘Happyend’: Venice Review

Dir. Neo Sora. Japan/USA 2024. 113mins

Oddly languid for a film about youth unrest, Happyend is a low-key Japanese drama about friendship, revolt and standing up to the surveillance state. “The systems that define people are crumbling in Japan,” opening titles notify us at the start of Neo Sora’s feature, which bills itself as a “story of the near future.” Invariably, that means that we are really watching a thinly-disguised tale of today, but this depiction of young people facing up against school and state authoritarianism lacks a certain urgency, despite its manifest intelligence and craft.

A crisp and understated piece

This is the first fiction feature from American writer-director Sora following Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, his much-praised 2023 documentary about his late father. More a reverie than a stark future-shock statement, Happyend is a promising rather than a bold arrival, but should attract attention following its debut in Venice’s Horizons sidebar. It will release in Japan on October 5 through Bitter End, and Metrograph Pictures have acquired North American rights.

While the film was largely shot in Kobe, the setting is Tokyo in the near future, the city menaced by the prospect of imminent earthquakes. The government is using this situation, invoking the matter of public safety, to crack down on opposition in a way that many citizens regard as opening the door to tyranny. Among those whose non-conformist behaviour will come under scrutiny are a group of high-school friends first seen sneaking their way into a techno club before it is raided by police; a USB stick handed to them by the resident muscular DJ will become a symbolic torch of freedom for them to carry. The group includes two boys, techno fan Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yutiko Hidaka) – the latter of Korean parentage, which means that his family does not have full citizenship rights in this markedly xenophobic future Japan.

After a spectacular prank is played at school involving the principal’s new car, new facial recognition surveillance equipment is installed that automatically penalises students with points, leading to absurd and arbitrary punishments. After one group of students ges in trouble for joining an anti-authority protest, another raises the ante by occupying the office of the increasingly irascible and ineffectual principal (an impressively testy performance from veteran actor Shiro Sano). The scene in which the protesters refuse the head’s desperate offer of sushi is one of the more taut, effective moments in a film that, despite the theme, is hampered by an overall feel of narrative inertia. 

There are also moments of brisk comic absurdity, some coming from class joker Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), while a running gag - in which students effectively ‘dub’ each other’s private dialogue from a distance – has its own charm. By and large, though, the social comment is somewhat diluted rather than reinforced by the film’s tender, brooding attention to character and to the students’ various shades of teen melancholy – notably alluding to an unarticulated attraction between male friends Yuta and Kou

In execution, however, Happyend is a crisp and understated piece, with Bill Kirstein’s cinematography making the most of nocturnal cityscapes and of sterile empty spaces in the school classrooms and corridors. And the charismatic young cast – while unconvincingly a little heavy on the pop star looks – brings a lively, impromptu-feeling organic energy. A gentle, piano-based score by Lia Ouyang Rusli carries its own echoes of Sakamoto stateliness, not over-reverentially but with grace.