‘New Group’ Review: Human Pyraminds and the Horror of Fitting In

Horror is full of alien races that want to subjugate humanity through coercion or assimilation. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, They Live, The Faculty, and more all operate under the assumption that the invaders would hide in plain sight, brainwashing or replacing humans before we can even mount a response. Yûta Shimotsu’s New Group takes a markedly different approach. The machinations of these aspiring alien overlords are front and center—forcing people into individuality-crushing human pyramids, shapes in which they stay for hours or days on end.

The film follows Ai (Anna Yamada), an outsider at her school, who witnesses a classmate inexplicably kneeling on the playground, unresponsive—unmoving. Strangely, the teachers pay him no mind, more intent on getting the rest of the kids back in class. But before long, two more students have joined the first, arranging themselves in a perfectly motionless three-person pyramid.

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As more and more students begin joining the bizarre playground formation, Ai teams up with transfer student Yu (Yuzu Aoki) as they try to uncover the mysterious forces at work, while avoiding being assimilated into the rest of their class. Soon, the news media catches wind and the formations spread beyond the school, quickly turning into a nationwide epidemic. As Yu and Ai (get it?) zero in on the teachers at the center of the strangeness, they must wage a climactic battle against the conformity threatening Japan.

Human Pyramids and Junji Ito’s Nightmare Logic

New Group is a pretty significant departure from Shimotsu’s previous film, Best Wishes to All (2023). Though that film had an equally surreal premise—a girl realizes her family’s happiness is dependent on the sustained imprisonment of another, unnamed man—New Group’s tone is much more lighthearted, leaning into the bizarro world in which the film takes place. It reminds me in a lot of ways of the work of Junji Ito: A simple, yet patently absurd situation is allowed to develop into a most extreme nightmare, though its effectiveness requires you to let that absurdity wash over you.

The gymnastics formations are silly. That much is undeniable. But they’re silly in a way that—works? The army of classmates chasing Yu and Ai through the halls is threatening enough, but when the teacher orders them into “attack formation,” and the students take on the outlandish shape of a tank (complete, inexplicably, with the combined weight of a vehicle, able to splatter dissenters underfoot as they run them over), the direness of their situation is much clearer. It’s a laugh-out-loud moment that, despite itself, is still strangely unsettling.

Comformity, Belonging, and a Too-Neat Resolution

The movie’s message, of course, is unabashedly transparent. Society, and in particular Japanese society, rewards conformity to a fault. Even before the formations start, teachers at the school are doing everything they can to stymy individual thinking. An art teacher scolds a student’s line drawing work for not being realistic; the PE teacher forces students into lockstep, as if the school were doing military drills. The film is clearly a satire on Japan’s notoriously rigid societal structure, but finds an equally valid home in the homogenous online bubbles we increasingly find ourselves in. An early scene in which reporters hound celebrities for details about their private lives, which devolves into brutal physical assault, as well as a government official proclaiming prosperity as he passes by rows of homeless people, show the lengths we seem to be willing to go in order to deny the humanity of others to satisfy our own wants and needs.

Ai’s unwillingness to fit in isn’t about personal political or social beliefs, though. Hers is rooted in a deep-seated trauma that, it turns out, simplifies rather than complicates the analogy. It ties the plot together a little too neatly for me, cheapening the commentary the film is trying to push through. The spectacle of enormous geometric shapes towering over the main characters is a sight to behold, but the film’s resolution might be more suited to a younger audience—those viewers who are wrestling with their own issues with belonging in rapidly evolving real and online spaces. New Group is a fun film with some wild ideas, it just doesn’t quite stick the landing (gymnastics pun intended).

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Article by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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