Happyend

Neo Sora’s Happyend, about a friendship between a group of high schoolers and more intimately about two boys who have known each other for years but are now threatening to grow apart, is one of the most compelling portraits of individuals living through the ascent of fascism. It is set in what feels like a very near future: everything except some minor advancements in (surveillance) technology looks the same as it does now. Connected by a passion for music, especially EDM, these teenagers hunt for the exhilarating experience of sound wherever they can find it, even if it lands them right in the middle of a police raid on an underground concert. Their passion is palpable, the sheer joy of sharing these moments, but the overbearing forces of state control intrude on it already before the true horrors have even begun. Worse, the signs of what will ultimately divide them is already visible in how their stakes differ: Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) is Japanese, and the police pass over him after a quick face scan, but Kou (Yukito Hidaka) is only a resident, even though his family has lived in Japan for four generations, and falls under additional, terrorising scrutiny that will follow his throughout the film. 
It begins with a prank. The film establishes the stakes, the context, through videos of a Japanese Prime Minister thirsting to use the threat of a predicted big earthquake as a thin excuse to establish a totalitarian state, raising fears about migrants to justify an escalating surveillance regime, utilising fear for his political aim of gaining more power. These little snippets are like background noise: they happen on ever-present screens, but the reality for these teenagers is still the small world of their high school, where they get to follow their passion for music in the music lab, where the visible regime of control isn’t the greater political apparatus, but the small-minded little dictator of a principal who parks his ridiculous yellow sports car for all to see. The morning after the aborted concert, Yuto dares Kou to topple the car. The result looks like a piece of sculptural art, eagerly filmed by the students. It is a prank, but in the context of the world these kids now live in, the principal, furious, misconstrues it as an act of terrorism that justifies his institution of a surveillance system in the school that automatically deducts points for any infringement. Something as small as not wearing the correct uniform – one of their friends likes wearing a skirt instead of trousers – results in demerits, creating an atmosphere of fear that no longer allows for expression of individuality. 

While the surrounding world becomes increasingly erratic, dominated by pro- and anti-government protests that are met with violence from the security forces, the smaller world of the high school begins mirroring those wider conflicts. Kou, more affected by the open racism where whether or not he is required to carry his residency card on him has become irrelevant because there are no limits to the power police can exert, begins to think of the wider picture, spurred on by Fumi (Kilala Inori), a politically active student who is trying to find ways to push back against their principal, who insists on fighting back against the intolerable even if it comes at a personal cost. She advocates for her non-Japanese fellow students who are being increasingly marginalised, and the general apathy in the student body that stays quiet in the face of the escalation, or even accommodating. Yuto remains as he always has been, pursuing his passion for music, but otherwise politically naive. The gap between them widens up to a point where Kou wonders if they would even be friends if they met now, but the film never falls into the despair of an irretrievably broken friendship: instead, they come back to one another, even as their graduation puts them on separate courses in life and Yuto, realising that there is less at stake for him personally than for his friend, steps up to protect him. 

All of this makes Happyend an incredibly prescient film to watch in these first weeks of 2026, where the limits of tolerating the intolerable are becoming more and more clear. 

2024, directed by Neo Sora, starring Makiko Watanabe, Yukito Hidaka, Ayumu Nakajima, Arazi, Shina Peng, Kosuke Tanaka, Kilala Inori, Hayato Kurihara, Shirô Sano, Yûta Hayashi.