New Group (2026) Review: Japanese Body Horror Takes Conformity to Disturbing Extremes

By Devine Smock | More Horror

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT

Well, what the hell is going on?

New Group opens with two celebrities being beaten by a mob of reporters, schoolgirls doing some wild shit and politicians being carried through the street in a patriotic parade that looks like fascism sponsored by a morning television show. Then Ai wakes up. It was a dream.

Or was it? Ha.

This is a Japanese horror film directed by Yûta Shimotsu from a screenplay he co-wrote with Momoko Sahara, and everyday reality cracks before the opening sequence is finished. A news report about a mysterious signal from space supplies some early pre-exposition, or whatever we want to call information that may explain everything and may explain absolutely nothing. After that, the movie drops us into the daily life of Ai, played by Anna Yamada, an anxious high school student who wants to be accepted even when she knows the people around her are doing something wrong.

She smiles when other people laugh. She watches a classmate get bullied and does nothing. She is not cruel, exactly. She is afraid of what might happen if the group turns around and looks at her.

Then Yu arrives. Played by Yuzu Aoki, he is a transfer student who has spent time outside Japan and has very little patience for everyone quietly accepting the rules. Yu confronts the bullies and tells Ai that standing there watching makes her part of it. He is correct, which does not make him any less irritating to somebody who has survived by trying not to be noticed.

The movie only runs about 82 minutes. Thank you. I like a filmmaker who can get in, create a bizarre human nightmare and get out before the idea starts asking for a miniseries. Shimotsu moves quickly, although there are places where New Group could have slowed down and trusted its own strangeness a little more.

It begins with one student crouched motionless on the soccer field. The next day, more students join him. Soon they are forming a human triangle, then a pyramid. Nobody knows why. Teachers who should be concerned start treating the formation as an expression of school unity. Students march. They chant. The drawings, the posture, the repetition and the obsession with ORDER make the fascist direction clear well before anybody says it out loud.

The pyramid comes from somewhere. Synchronized group gymnastics have a history in Japanese school culture, and Shimotsu turns that familiar image into an oppressive piece of human architecture. Everybody has a place. Everybody supports the structure. The people at the bottom carry the weight while the people above them get the view. Subtle? No. Effective? Sometimes very much so.

The first person who openly refuses is beaten by a teacher in front of the school. I mean beaten. The adults watch, the students watch and the institution absorbs it like this is a normal disciplinary procedure. The movie has now gone from curious and creepy to genuinely oppressive. We are just beating the shit out of kids because they will not join the school pyramid. Alright.

Visually, the formations are the best thing in the movie. Cinematographer Toru Nishioka and the performers turn ordinary bodies into something that looks alive but should not be. Students crawl through hallways as one mass, stack themselves into impossible shapes and move like individual limbs belonging to a much larger animal. The effects help, but the choreography and physical bodies are what make those moments work. It is creepy because we still recognize every person inside the thing.

I wish Shimotsu trusted that imagery enough to let it breathe. A figure appears on the soccer field. The camera moves in. Tension music. It moves closer. More tension music. Closer. Percussion. We get it. Something is wrong. The movie often has a perfectly strange image and then starts pounding on it with the score until the unease becomes an instruction. Some of these scenes would be more disturbing with natural sound, more distance and another five seconds before the cut.

Shimotsu shows more control in the hallway sequence, where the geometry of the school traps Ai and Yu inside the group’s movement. Doors, walls and bodies start functioning as one system. There is no safe direction because the building itself seems to have decided they do not belong there. That is the movie at its best. It takes a familiar social fear and gives it legs. Hundreds of them.

The problem is that the metaphor becomes so obvious that the characters occasionally disappear underneath it. The school demands conformity. The politicians demand conformity. The media creates conformity. The family creates conformity. Groups are bad. Individuals are good. Message received. New Group keeps underlining it anyway, sometimes with enough force to tear through the page.

Ai’s home life complicates that argument in a more interesting way. Her family continues setting a place at the table for her younger sister, who died years earlier after Ai left her standing in the road and she was struck by a car. Her parents behave as though the girl is still alive because accepting the shared fiction is apparently easier than living with the grief. When Ai finally says what everybody knows, the family turns against her. The nooses, the smiling parents and the attempt to strangle their surviving daughter push the movie into another kind of surreal horror.

This material gives Ai more than a generic fear of fitting in. She has spent years inside a small group that requires her to deny reality. Speaking honestly threatens the structure of her family in the same way refusing the pyramid threatens the school. Yamada is very good in these scenes. She can look frightened, guilty and angry without turning Ai into a passive blank waiting for the screenplay to tell her what to do.

I just wish the movie spent more time letting that pain connect to the larger phenomenon. The dead sister, the parents’ denial and Ai’s guilt arrive with real emotional weight, but New Group is already racing toward another formation, another surreal image and the final collision of its symbols. It has found the human reason Ai would finally refuse the group, then almost runs past it.

Yu is also more useful to the story than fully developed as a person. Aoki brings enough odd charm and bluntness to make him watchable, but his relationship with Ai never becomes as strong as the ending needs it to be. Their attraction is intentionally awkward and strange, which I appreciate. These are not two polished television teenagers making speeches beneath perfect lighting. Still, when Ai’s feelings for Yu become part of her final stand, the emotional connection feels assumed more than earned.

By then the phenomenon has spread beyond the school. The human formations roll through people, absorb them and leave violence behind. Teachers, parents and ordinary citizens become parts of the same moving order. Whether the signal from space literally caused it, amplified something already inside everyone or is simply another piece of the nightmare is never completely settled. I am fine with that. Explaining the alien science behind the murder pyramid would not make the movie better.

The climax makes the film’s argument literal. The principal praises the happiness of surrendering yourself to the group. Even Yu joins the pyramid. Ai finally refuses, calls to the people inside it and forms a competing human sphere. The triangle represents hierarchy. There is always somebody above and somebody underneath. A sphere has no top or bottom, at least until it starts rolling over people.

It is a clever visual answer, but I am not convinced it solves the movie’s own problem. Ai defeats one collective by organizing another collective. The people in her sphere may retain their individual poses, and the shape is supposed to remove hierarchy, but they are still becoming a large human object to fight a different large human object. Maybe that contradiction is the point. Maybe there is no such thing as complete individuality and the real question is whether a group allows difference or crushes it. Or maybe the film became so committed to triangles and circles that it forgot people are messier than geometry.

Either way, the collision is certainly memorable. Subtle left the building a long time ago.

The following morning, the world appears to reset. Ai’s family no longer prepares breakfast for her dead sister, suggesting they may finally be accepting what happened. School looks normal again. Then students behind Ai begin another formation. She answers by making the circle gesture, ready to resist it this time. The group is still there. It will probably always be there. At least now she knows she can say no.

New Group is original, strange and often visually impressive. Yamada gives it a real emotional center, the body choreography creates images that will stick with me and the 82-minute runtime keeps the film from suffocating under its own symbolism. It is also loud when silence would be creepier, emotionally thin in a few important places and so direct about conformity that it occasionally feels like the movie is ordering us to understand its warning about being ordered around.

There is a really good movie somewhere inside this weird thing. What we get is interesting, sometimes disturbing and never boring enough to dismiss. It does not entirely come together, but at least it gives me something unusual to argue with.

I am not joining the pyramid. I did not hate watching it get built.

6.3/10

New Group premiered on Shudder and AMC+ on Friday, November 6, 2026.

A screener of New Group was provided for review purposes.