🔗 Share this article

Neo Sora, known for an intimate portrait Opus, about his father, makes his feature debut with a complex, captivating and often brilliant picture. Co-produced by producer Anthony Chen, the project successfully blends speculative critique, youthful narrative, and high school dystopia. This production combines the tone of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with subversive school narratives, and there might even be an echo of introspective character studies—only without the ritual suicide.

A Futuristic Academic Environment

At a secondary school in a Japanese city in the future, learners encounter control by the reactionary xenophobia of their elders. Recurring tremor notifications, and actual earthquakes themselves, generate a general mood of suppressed panic which the officials claim warrants a perpetual clampdown. The prime minister has taken to claiming that troublesome factions are exploiting the situation of the earthquakes to commit lawlessness.

In the school, there is an barely hidden ethnic prejudice for students who are from diverse heritages along with those who have unorthodox or rebellious views.

A Stunt Which Provokes Surveillance

On a particular day, the administrator grows angry to see that some prankster has positioned his automobile up on its end in the school grounds, resembling a standing stone. Based on evidence, he accuses the group of rebellious students of troublemakers who have been permitted by progressive instructor a faculty member to gather in the school club area.

Among them are Yuta, a fellow pupil, Korean-Japanese Kou, an international attendee, African-American student Tom, and the academically inclined Ata-chan.

A Dystopian Turn

But the angry school head can’t prove anything, and the film itself never reveals which person performed the deed or the methods used. Seeking retribution, he introduces a CCTV monitoring and face-recognition system throughout the institution, labeled an obvious nod to the classic prison design.

This technology monitors the students’ every move leading to a serious breakdown in the school, reminiscent of group anxiety. It becomes especially impactful for the main students, for them the school’s calamitous loss of privacy could imply while they heroically challenge this new oppression, they are unable to express their feelings for each other.

A Reflective Ending

This is a movie that chooses not to give us straightforward plots, obvious character traits, or explicit messages. The strict administrator himself could possibly not be quite so strict as initially portrayed. It’s a visually striking, contemplative, emotional movie in which common adolescent struggles carry equal weight as the dystopian themes.