Critics Campus 2025 participant Amelia Leonard discusses Happyend’s masterfully tightrope-treading portrayals of youth, rebellion and coming of age amid an increasingly oppressive near-future Japan.

For Japan, a country with such a complex history of political upheaval, dystopia seems less a genre than a persistent undercurrent in its collective psychology. Filmmakers have continually returned to imagined futures to examine the lived trauma and social disillusionment of its people – say, in the visceral nihilism of Battle Royale (2000) or the nuclear dread of The Man Who Stole the Sun (1979). In consideration of the current climate, the dialogues that emerge from these films carry an uneasy weight. We are, after all, living in a time when right-wing governments continue to gain prominence, and overt surveillance, control and nationalism are not distant threats of fabricated fiction but daily realities.

Though beginning with an ominous statement – “The systems that define people are crumbling in Tokyo. Something big is about to change” – Neo Sora’s contribution to the lineage of speculative fiction unfurls as a measured, poignant departure from the provocative style of its dystopian counterparts. An exercise in elegant restraint, Happyend centres on the emotional terrain of a generation coming of age in the surveillance era, deftly balancing wider social commentary with the intimate concerns of teenhood.

A near-future Tokyo sets the scene for a group of high-schoolers on the brink of graduation. Giddy and wide-eyed, they spend their time chasing thrills and sharing their love of techno at their unofficial Music Research Club – their last frontier of self-expression and carefree folly. For childhood friends Kou and Yuta (played by novice actors Yukito Hidaka and Hayato Kurihara, respectively), music has always been a common language. But familiarity proves to be a precarious link with which to carry the two into the future. Yuta, rarely seen without a pair of headphones slung around his neck, would much rather block out the noise of the world than face it. Kou, being of Zainichi Korean descent, has no such luxury. Aware that his every action draws more scrutiny than those of his Japanese peers, he begins to drift towards his more politically engaged classmates, including the outspoken Fumi (Kilala Inori). Surrounding them is a decidedly diverse portrait of Japanese youth – Ming (Shina Peng) is of Taiwanese descent and Tomu (Arazi) has African-American roots – a representation that resists Japan’s self-image of cultural homogeneity. Within their dynamic lies a historical gravity, wherein the aftershocks of Japan’s colonial era still find shape in the structures of daily life.

It feels apt that music should emerge as such a vital means of communication in the film’s narrative, given that Sora is the son of renowned composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Sora brings a heightened attention to sound, letting music serve as both a binding force within the group and a larger emblem of quiet rebellion. Animating these shifting currents is Lia Ouyang Rusli’s score, which is deployed with a light touch that oscillates between electronic interludes and wistful piano trills.

While the country’s political state heads towards its own kind of rupture, the looming threat of a catastrophic earthquake is constantly hung over its citizens – it is projected onto geo-engineered clouds and the towering façades of skyscrapers – conveniently ushering in an emergency decree that extends governmental powers under the guise of public safety. An air of authoritarianism seeps into the local high school as a daring prank is quickly rebranded as an act of terrorism by its autocratic principal (Shirō Sano), leading to the installation of an intrusive surveillance system, ‘Panopty’. With the end of school in sight and their entry into the real world on the horizon, this tight-knit group of friends find their bonds fraying as they grapple with the prospect of inheriting a world they do not want nor belong to.

Happyend

There’s a confident composition to the sprawling urban landscapes that Sora constructs. His sense of scale and distance draws parallels to Edward Yang and the Taiwanese New Wave at large, whereby intimate narratives find themselves woven into the fabric of a larger social architecture. By foregoing the close-up almost entirely, Sora creates a distinctly ambling rhythm that persists in the service of ambient anxiety – a pace not usually associated with tales of political unrest. Here, the anticipation of disaster forms its own elongated perception of time. For the observer, there is a sense of being caught between conflicting temporalities, one that leans into collective memory and nostalgia while simultaneously projecting its future. Just as the protagonists find themselves immobilised by external forces too great to reckon with, we too find ourselves caught in stasis.

But this Tokyo is overwhelming by design, its alienating vastness morphing the metropolis into the disquieting calm of a teenage wasteland. Cinematographer Bill Kirstein’s roving camera ushers us through these spaces with a fluidity mirroring its unmoored inhabitants, only to return us abruptly to the restrictive confines of regiment and order in the form of static, high-angle shots that reinforce the ever-present mechanical eye of CCTV. It’s an approach that offers nothing but a cold, categorical stare, seeing everything yet understanding very little.

In Sora’s future, the closest relationships struggle to exist in isolation from their cultural, political and class contexts. In a particularly poignant scene, Kou and Yuta haul a massive subwoofer across the city, which is laden with obstacles. The weight is both literal and figurative, their shared past dragged forth into a future they may no longer inhabit together. Lingering at the centre of a literal crossroads, Kou laments, “I want you to change.” All Yuta can offer is, “In what way?” Here, the larger forces at play find themselves distilled into their most affecting and unadorned form: the quiet heartbreak of outgrowing even our closest friendships, however much we may wish to cling to them.

Though Happyend reflects the uncertain timbre of our times back to us, all is not doomed. Sora strikes a delicate tonal balance in depicting youth caught in the tide of transition within a society whose future is just as unstable. Despite the structures that seek to oppress them, his young rebels will undoubtedly discover new means of resistance. Perhaps, then, it is not about dismantling the cage outright or offering declarations of certainty. Such resoluteness is a falsity. Instead, Sora’s optimism emanates from the ties that sustain us as we endure the burden of systems we didn’t ourselves build.

Happyend screens on Friday 15, Thursday 21 and Sunday 24 August as part of the MIFF 2025 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.