New Group (2025) Film Review – No I in Team

Posted on by Jim Cox

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New Group is a 2025 Japanese body horror film written and directed by Yuta Shimotsu. After beginning his film career with the 2022 short film Best Wishes to All, Shimotsu expanded it in 2023 into a feature-length version with the same name. Outside of film, Shimotsu has recently directed the upcoming TV series Strange: Junji Ito’s Tales for Sleepless Nights, written by Daisuke Hosaka.

High school student Ai sees her world collapse when a strange cult-like mentality gradually turns people around her into mindless followers who can transform simple gymnastics routines into a nightmarish dance of death.

The school's principal in from of the Human Pyramid in New Group (2025)

Confronting the dangers of mindless conformity and blind devotion, New Group denotes the importance of individuality and critical thinking within a functioning civilisation. As the general populace becomes increasingly jaded and burnt out just trying to survive, pressure from traditional groups such as family, work, or government to blindly lead the lives dictated to them makes it easier to slide into that conformity than to confront it. However, these themes aren’t exactly explored with any subtlety, outright bashing the audience over the head with these blatantly overt aspects. From a student’s surrealist artwork being singled out and destroyed to a student being beaten by a teacher for questioning their strange demands, the film repeatedly overstates that personal interpretation and free thinking are unacceptable.

Despite this, New Group delivers some nuanced, unsettling uncanniness throughout. Each scene is permeated by an unidentifiable, erroneous atmosphere that builds to an eerie reveal of the students’ loss of autonomy, as they chant in unison and move in harmony. While acting seemingly normal during day-to-day classes, their sudden devolution to mindless drones certainly delivers an uncomfortable impact—slowly spreading virally throughout society until only a small group remains unaffected.

The deadly Human Pyramid in New Group (2025)

While New Group is a body horror, it doesn’t approach the genre in the typical sense. Rather than depicting mutilation or excessive gore, the film utilises atypical dominant movement patterns and personal subjugation to deliver its sense of body horror. From the giant human pyramid to the group’s ‘attack formation’, the film uses these elements to compound its themes of conformity and loss of individuality. Outside of this, the film is relatively light on more graphic depictions of violence. The death caused by the roaming gang of mindless school kids is mostly depicted off-screen, with an added splash of CGI blood to signify their demise.

Providing fantastic performances, the entire cast delivers an outstanding depiction of heteronomy. The pupils’ mass, synchronised chanting and movement are effortlessly fluid, effectively consolidating their loss of autonomy. Furthermore, while performances are somewhat exaggerated, they are delivered with an earnest sincerity—lacking any self-realisation of the absurdity of the situation.

Taking an uncommon approach to social commentary, New Group is an unsettling depiction of cultish subservience and the importance of critical thinking, both as an individual and in society. While it lacks nuance surrounding these main themes, it certainly delivers them in an entertaining, atypical fashion. With its unique take on the body horror genre, uncanny atmosphere, and unnerving performances, the film is successful in taking mundane situations and injecting an air of foreboding throughout.

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New Group (2025) streams on Shudder starting November 6th.

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