Happyend: an impressively assured future-shock satire

• Reviewed from the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. 

Hey, teacher: leave those kids alone. Happyend unfolds in a dystopian near-future where a title card informs us that systems are crumbling. It’s here, beneath a subtly Blade Runner-ish skyline and amidst intermittent earthquakes, that a group of teenagers including aspiring techno musicians Kou (Hidaki Yukito) and Yuta (Kurihara Hayao) try to live their best lives. When cops bust up an underground rave party, the DJ passes our heroes a USB stick as if imploring them to continue the culture war by any means necessary. 

The sense of authoritarian overreach extends from the streets and into the local high school; the hallways have been adorned with neo-Foucauldian surveillance technology that uses facial recognition software to keep the student body in line. If Japanese director Neo Sora’s politically pressurised coming-of-age comedy has a signature image, it’s class clown Ata-chan (Hayashi Yuta), staring down the barrel of the panopticon with his middle fingers extended.

Like most future-shock satires, Happyend isn’t so much a cautionary tale as a state of the union; Sora’s vision of a bureaucratic, xenophobic, and quasi-militarised educational-industrial complex prods his country’s encroaching social conservatism while also highlighting more universal adolescent anxieties about foreclosed personal and professional possibilities. 

The film’s smart but schematic screenplay is structured by the affectionate dialectic between Kuo and Yuta – one stoic, one stupid, and both terrified of losing the other after graduation. While the boys fret, student activist Fumi (Inori Kilala) fulminates, rallying her peers to push back against the adults who disingenuously claim to be acting in their best interests. The question is whether such defiance – whether channelled through formal complaints, artistic endeavour, or elaborate, Situationist-style pranks – are a means to an end or simply a virtue in and of themselves.  

As a piece of filmmaking, Happyend is both impressively assured and perhaps a bit too deadpan for its own good. Sora – whose previous film was a documentary about his father, the iconic composer Sakamoto Ryuichi – is a natural born formalist; he knows exactly where to put the camera, and also when to just leave it there for a long time. As the film goes on, however, the ratio of nervous tension to dead air starts slackening. (The blunt didacticism of the dialogue can get wearing, too). What keeps things engaging – and ultimately makes Happyend moving – are the committed performances by the younger actors, especially Inori, who steals the movie from her goofier co-stars by sheer, quiet force of will, inhabiting a sense of ideological resolve that feels positively aspirational. Give her a Zero for Conduct – and an A for effort.