Set at a strictly monitored Japanese high school at some point in the near future, Neo Sora’s “Happyend” might be a low-key drama about a group of friends as they steel themselves (and each other) against tomorrow in the weeks before they graduate and scatter to the winds. Yet this coming-of-age story — however pensive and hushed the rest of it might be — begins with an ominous blast of text that wouldn’t be out of place at the start of a violent sci-fi epic like Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira.” “Weather buildings creak louder,” read the words on the screen. “The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo. Something big is about to change.”
With an intro like that, I half-expected the film’s opening shot to show the biggest city on the planet engulfed in a silent black dome of pent-up psychic energy. Instead, “Happyend” lights up on a scene that finds its teenage leads sneaking into an underground techno club, and then laughing together with youthful abandon as they flee the cops who’ve shut the party down. By the end of this wistfully well-remembered look at the world to come, however, those very different prologues — one apocalyptic, the other giddily alive — will come to seem like one and the same. Sora’s ultra-realistic characters may not get mixed up with Neo-Tokyo’s coolest biker gang or mutate into giant, oozing babies the size of an Olympic sports arena. Still, their bodies are similarly absorbed into the technological crises of their time, and their friendships are similarly challenged by the frustrations of inheriting a future that feels like it’s already given up on them.
A year after paying tribute to his late father with “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,” Neo Sora makes his narrative debut with a movie whose title was inspired by one of the most delicate compositions performed in that concert doc, and whose Lia Ouyang Rusli score — a roiling wave of plucked strings and tidal synths — evokes Sakamoto’s memory with every note. That nostalgic approach to sound anchors a film sustained by the tension between yesterday and tomorrow; a lived-in work of lightly dystopian fiction that’s palpably shaded with Sora’s memories of his own political awakening.
Set in Tokyo but shot in the more production-friendly environs of Kobe, “Happyend” takes a very light touch to its vision of the future. Technology has advanced at the same rate that freedoms have regressed, and so the film’s sterile world feels caught in a semi-permanent stasis. The police use cell phones to visually identify their suspects (a quick facial scan with the camera app reveals name, age, and citizenship), while the kids seldom appear to use cell phones at all.
They don’t see much romance in the restrictive digitalia they’ve grown up with, which makes plenty of sense even before their school adopts a Foucauldian surveillance program called “Panoptny,” which monitors the students’ every move and displays their transgressions on a Jumbotron-sized LED screen above the campus quad. If not for the Music Research Club, where BFFs Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka) listen to thumping EDM beats with the rest of their friend group, it would be easy for these kids to forget they had a pulse.
In the wake of a funny prank the principal (Shiro Sano) is quick to label as an act of terrorism, the school moves to shut down the Music Research Club as part of a sweeping — and uncomfortably fascistic — campaign to get the youths under control. Of course, the powers that be are all for nostalgia when it suits their needs. Stoking rumors of a once-in-a-century earthquake, Japan’s prime minister has manufactured enough ambient fear to pass a decree that allows the government to expand its reach during an emergency, a move intended to revive the same brand of nationalism that led to the mass murder of Zainichi Koreans after the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923. Kou’s working-class family has been in the country for more than four generations, but that doesn’t stop their restaurant from being labeled as “foreign-owned.” They were promised flying cars, but instead they got xenophobic slogans projected on clouds.
Kou and Yuta have known each other since they were little kids (they happily reminisce about jerking off together for the first time), but their dawning awareness of the world around them begins to expose their differences. Kou is a serious-minded kid in need of a college scholarship, while the wealthier Yuta has always been so free to goof around that he only knows how to think about fun (he’s an aspiring DJ, and rarely seen without a massive pair of headphones slung around his neck). It’s Yuta who decides to tip the principal’s yellow new sports car on its head in the school parking lot, but Kou who can’t leave home without his special resident ID card. It’s Kou who has the most to lose when the principal starts a witch hunt to root out the culprit. It’s Kuo who develops a crush on Fumi (Kilala Inori), the most politically engaged girl in their class, and Yuta who keeps dancing in place while the police raid the techno club around him. Their shared friendship has been the bedrock of their respective social realities for as long as they can remember, but now it’s beginning to quake underneath their feet.
“Happyend” explores the fault lines of that friendship so gently that it almost feels like Sora is afraid of triggering any shockwaves, but his film benefits from its disinterest in high drama. This isn’t a story about long-simmering resentments coming to a head, nor is it a story about the one big incident that will splinter its characters apart forever. Sora is far more attuned to the subtle gradations of a self-contained group on the precipice of its collision with reality, and to the way that young people begin to see themselves in the world — starting on the massive television screen that monitors them like Big Brother — as they prepare to inherit it.
Sora’s script is peppered with errant flirtations and private jokes, but it eschews clear romantic subplots and sustained comedic setpieces to instead focus on the small fissures that lead Kuo to wonder if he and Yuta would have been friends if they met in college. The same fissures that led Yuta to take a menial job at a local record store (“Can you be on time for your shifts?” the manager asks him during his interview. “Maybe” Yuta replies). Meanwhile, Tomu (Arazi), one of several Black characters in a film that pointedly counters the homogeneity of Japanese cinema, frets over how to break the news that he’s moving to America after graduation, while the goofy Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi, the only professional actor in the film’s very authentic cast) struggles to stay happy in a world that denies him a good reason to smile.
The principal’s search for the prankster intensifies in tandem with the anti-government protests that flare up around the city, but those concerns are flattened into a backdrop for Sora’s poignantly observational study of what happens when a generation meets its moment and vice-versa. The film’s drifting pace and antiseptic environs only seem to grow more pronounced as graduation draws closer and the students become more proactive in their response to Panoptny. But even in its most uncertain moments, “Happyend” is carried by the sincerity of its characters and their affection for each other.
This is a frustrated portrait by a self-described leftist who isn’t shy about his misgivings with techno-fascism (especially in a country that’s become synonymous with the neon dream of a better future), but Sora is far too loving to let anger guide his hand. The film’s endless walls of white and gray belie its focus on a group of young people whose hearts are bursting with color — even the ones who’ve given up on their generation still find a way to believe in each other. The world could come crashing down around them at any moment, and in some ways, it already has, but it’s touchingly honest to watch these kids create lasting memories in spite of the instability that surrounds them. Bleak as their present might seem in the moment, you can already feel the warm vibration of the aftershocks to come, jolting these characters back to the future they once shared together.
Grade: B+
“Happyend” will screen as part of the 2024 New York Film Festival. Metrograph Pictures will release it in theaters at a later date.
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