‘Happyend’ Review: High School Becomes a Microcosm of Surveillance-State Oppression in Affecting Near-Future Drama

Speculative fiction as cautionary sociopolitical commentary, Happyend marks a confident first step into narrative features for Neo Sora, who made last year’s stirring documentary tribute to his late father, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus. The Japanese writer-director offsets the film’s depth of feeling with understatement and gentle humor, working with an appealing young cast as graduation-year high school classmates facing — or refusing to face — a bleak outlook for their future. Capturing that transitional moment when seemingly permanent adolescent ties suddenly appear uncertain, this is a melancholy drama laced with notes of anger and disquiet, but also resilience.

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Sora opens with onscreen text about the traditional enforcers of crumbling systems growing weary in the near future, ushering in a time of change. That change is represented by youthful rebellion.

Keeping his focus tight on five inseparable friends plus one influential outsider to the group, the filmmaker effectively views their acts of individual and collective resistance, in the shadow of a government leaning toward totalitarianism and a climate in which the threat of natural disaster is constant.

Cellphone earthquake alerts have become a regular part of life, prompting the prime minister to announce expanded government power in cases of emergency. This reveals itself notably when protest movements form and police crackdowns turn violent.

All this is background canvas, however, for a delicate portrait of late adolescence, suspended between pleasurable distractions and creeping anxieties about what comes next. At the center are two lifelong friends whose contrasting responses to the darkening mood around them, both at school and in the national political arena, expose differences of which neither had previously been aware.

Close since childhood, Yuta (Hayao Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaki) are talented amateur DJs, aspiring to careers at the mixing deck. Their easy, uncomplicated bond extends to a posse that also includes Tomu (Arazi), Ming (Shina Peng) and Ata-chan (Yuta Hayashi), whose renegade sense of style can be gleaned from the billowing skirt he pairs with his uniform of a white shirt and a black blazer. 

When cops shut down an unlicensed techno party, the group heads back to school after hours, cleverly distracting security with a meowing phone app and heading upstairs to the “Music Research Club” to pump out some beats and dance. Later, while Yuta and Kou are on the roof smoking a cigarette, the sight of the gleaming new yellow sports car belonging to their rigid principal (Shiro Sano) proves too much for them to resist. Their prank gives the entire school a laugh the next morning but has repercussions.

Police are summoned, prompting an outburst from student activist Fumi (Kilala Inori) about cops being “bureaucrats with weapons,” serving only to protect the country’s wealth. Kou is the main suspect, more by virtue of his being from a Korean family than anything else; the principal, who refers to the car vandalism as “terrorism,” threatens to withhold Kou’s college recommendation. But with no proof, disciplinary measures take a different course.

The principal has an elaborate new security system installed with facial-recognition technology cameras positioned throughout the school, allowing for miscreant students to be identified and slapped with demerit points. At first, it’s treated like a joke, with Ata-chan getting a round of applause when he swiftly racks up ten points for making obscene gestures at a camera.

The graduating class finds their simpatico homeroom teacher replaced by a humorless, by-the-book type, and the Music Research Club is deemed a fire hazard and shut down, the electronic equipment locked away in a storeroom.

A substantial earthquake, which further damages the car, prompts the prime minister to put an emergency decree into effect, claiming that natural disasters increase crime rates. Fumi encourages Kou to join her at the resulting street protests. The ripple effect of alarm and paranoia brings out neighborhood watch groups to patrol the streets at night.

Kou starts getting frustrated by apolitical Yuta’s immaturity, his “have fun until the world ends” attitude. Among other signs of group unity being tested, the most poignant is Yuta’s initially hurt reaction when biracial Tomu shares that he’ll be going to college in America, where he has relatives. 

The situation at school becomes more incendiary when a military instructor is brought in to teach self-defense and, in another example of casual racism, all non-Japanese nationals are excluded “for security reasons.” Fumi leads the pushback, her actions yielding results and prompting defiance in others — most amusingly seen in Ata-chan’s graduation outfit. But when Yuta speaks up, his courage comes at a price.

Sora strikes an expert tonal balance between the bittersweet, elegiac qualities of the end-of-school drama, with compassionate observation of the maturation process, and the volatile microcosm of an education institution that becomes like a prison, pointing to broader political implications in the outside world. The movie never loses sight of the personal, involving us from the start in the experiences of Yuta, Kou and their friends, while bringing a light yet lingering touch to larger fears affecting all of us.

DP Bill Kirstein, who also shot Sora’s Opus, has an elegant eye for composition, finding poetry in the stark urban landscapes of a fictional Tokyo (Happyend was shot mostly in Kobe). Composer Lia Ouyang Rusli’s score complements that visual grace while also capturing the characters’ youthful energy in techno interludes. The young actors, almost all newcomers, are naturals in a sure-footed movie that is set in the future but fully plugged into global political anxieties of the present.