Muno (Yo, right), he’s tall and friendly
Foofa (Oh, hehehehehe), she’s pink and happy
Brobee (Woah), the little green one
Toodee (Yeah, woo), she likes to have fun
Plex (Woah), a magic robot
Let’s all come and play with DJ Lance Rock today– Yo Gabba Gabba! Theme
Filmmaker Yûta Shimotsu screened his haunting Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ) at The Overlook Film Festival 2025, winning the award for Scariest Feature, so it makes sense that he would return. This time around, Shimotsu trades the despair within the societal notion of personal happiness being tied to others’ sorrow for an analysis of conformity and authoritarianism through satirical cosmic horror. Having had its North American premiere during Fantasia International Film Festival 2025 and having been recently acquired by Shudder for future release, Shimotsu’s New Group has its Louisiana premiere during The Overlook Film Festival 2026, bringing with it a hilariously unsettling look at the ways in which society is broken due to the various systems it employs to raise up the few and control the masses. None of which are as terrible as the notion of groups.
A scene from the film NEW GROUP. Photo Credit: KADOKAWA. Photo courtesy of Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
High schooler Ai (Anna Yamada) keeps her head down and frequently just goes with whatever is happening around her. While that keeps her out of the spotlight, it also means she possesses no distinct shape of her own. This begins to change somewhat when transfer student Yu (Yuzu Aoki) arrives and steps in where her instincts tell her she should yet is afraid to do so. The timing couldn’t be better as their classmates and instructors start to exhibit some truly odd behavior that begins with a single person resting on their hands and knees in a gymnastics formation pose on the sports field. One becomes two becomes three as more and more people join, the circumference of influence growing wider by the day and the threat to join becoming all the more clear.
Society is built on rules. Wherever you grow up, you learn languages so you can communicate (verbal and non-verbal alike), jobs are assigned based on age and skill, and schooling tends to be a priority for most. Through the educational system, the young are taught what they need to know in order to propagate the cycle when it’s their turn to have kids. What does it mean, though, when someone wants to live a life that breaks those rules? In our youth, going against convention tends to lead to shunning or victimization (begone, non-believer!); while such choices in adulthood can lead to social ostracization or even political attack. Such is the strength of society’s rules, even when they defy previously acceptable or acknowledged behaviors. One is pressured from the beginning to always be a part of a group — neigh, *the* group if one is to get along. In their script, Shimotsu (Best Wishes to All) and first-time screenwriter Momoko Sahara attack the notion that being a part of a group is nothing more than a piece of a greater system of control designed to keep people milling about their lives instead of examining them, challenging them, and, more importantly, confronting them.
To do this, rather than playing it straight with Ai facing off against a human threat, Shimotsu and Sahara introduce a nondescript alien force that asserts it in the guise of her school principal. The representation of an authority figure whose will she’s instructed to abide by on the daily (again, an agreed upon rule of society that students must adhere to the guidance of their teachers and administrators) smartly serves to cultivate connections for global audiences without the need for a great deal of setup, while the inclusion of some off-world force empowers the script to get as absurd as it wants. Unlike 2025’s Bugonia (itself an adaptation of South Korea’s 2001 dark comedy Save the Green Planet!), New Group doesn’t hide the question of interstellar influence as Shimotsu opens the film on the cosmos before shifting to a shot of Earth and a close-up of Japan, then a series of mini-sequences to drive home the ruinous behavior of specific groups within the country; followed shortly thereafter by a news report of a signal from space with unknown origin. It’s not quite Little Shop of Horrors (1986) in its specificity, but the audience is given enough to know that *something* is lurking, which puts us only a few steps ahead of Ai leading up to the point where things start to get weirder than normal. By placing the cosmic elements up front and removing the question of influence, Shimotsu releases the audience from the tension of a traditional thriller and is more freely able to manipulate expectation through the weaponization of rules.
“We accept her; one of us. We accept her; one of us. Gooble gobble gooble gobble; we accept her, we accept her.”
Groups, by and large, aren’t necessarily a bad thing. By operating within one, an individual can prosper and grow, but the group itself (what it offers and how) can be the part that’s detrimental to one’s personal perspective and development. A group that admires conformity will only produce the same things over and over, discarding or denying anything that defies social mores. Anything that differs, anything that seeks to branch out, will be cut off and cauterized so as not to infect the whole. It’s because of this that parents are perfectly fine with children’s programming like Yo Gabba Gabba!, but are less so with Tod Browning’s 1932 classic Freaks, despite their connection and similar messaging. The series, with its bright lights and colorful situations, entertains children while promoting ideas of acceptance. The film offers a darker-yet-similar view as the titular freaks are the innocence of the film, only reacting with violence and anger when their good-natured sensibilities are taken advantage of by a “normie” only interested in the wealth of Hans (Harry Earles), a sideshow carnival performer with dwarfism who is murdered. The song from which Yo Gabba Gabba! takes their show name (and The Ramones via their song “Pinhead”) is one of honest affection and acceptance, which the treacherous Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) is disturbed by because there’s no reason (other than money) why she would want to be associated with this group. The sideshow performers are a group that seemingly defies social conventions and rules, shunned for no other reason than disability or body difference and not character. So, when a group comes along that tells you its only purpose to bring people together the “right people” or, worse, “all people,” one must consider what they want and what they do at the first sign of rebuttal. For New Group, it means either joining the gymnastic formation pyramid or being trampled by it, thereby illustrating that the notion of a group is only as supportive or destructive as the will of its leader and the perception of its occupants.
This brings us to Yamada and her Ai — the center of the story and the one whose choices (or lack thereof) are paramount to success and failure. As written, Ai is a typical shy high schooler, aware of what’s right and wrong, but so consumed by anxiety that taking action is near-impossible. This is the expected journey for a character in a tale about control, so take heart that Shimotsu and Sahara don’t care about your expectations. Rather, the further into the film we (and Ai) go, the more the rules of expectations are shifted, the more we learn, and the more the allegory of control transforms to reveal a superhero origin story underneath (minus the superpowers). What is being a superhero than self-actualization and the ability to take action on injustice? Amid all the surrealism and absurdity, Yamada manages to keep the film and audience grounded through her performance of Ai, ensuring that we never lose sight of the humanity at the core of the film. If we do, we may start to agree with the antagonist’s perspective of freedom within a controlled system, which puts us on our own backfoot. Because Yamada is able to keep the performance within the energy level of the film, never going so big or so small, even when narrative bits invite Ai to do so, the audience never loses sight of what matters: individual authenticity.
L-R: Yuzu Aoki as Yu and Anna Yamada as Ai in NEW GROUP. Photo Credit: Shudder. Photo courtesy of The Overlook Film Festival 2026.
As a sophomore feature, Shimotsu is revealing himself as a director to show up for. Both New Group and Best Wishes to All (2023) dare to challenge Japanese society and systems at large. They each utilize horror elements, not to terrify or upset audiences, but to get them to see the ideologies they engage with every day in a different way so as to shock them out of complacency. To its credit, New Group doesn’t totally admonish those who seek to find their own groups, acknowledging that grouping is natural and, in many ways inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be exclusionary or toxic. Groups can be unifying and supportive without the requirement of conformity. In numbers, we can do just as many terrible things as wonderful things, so why not band together to uplift, advise, and grow.
You be you, I’ll be me — we’ll be one of us, not one of them.
Screened during The Overlook Film Festival 2026.
In Japanese theaters June 12th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official The Overlook Film Festival New Group webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews
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