Happyend
Neo Sora’s Happyend unfolds in a near-future Tokyo that feels both familiar and subtly uncanny, a city where everyday life is increasingly regulated by hidden lenses and procedural authority. At the centre of the story are high school friends Kou and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara), whose shared passion for underground electronic music offers a rare, intimate window into their lives. What begins as a seemingly minor prank – targeting the principal’s (Shiro Sano) prized sports car – quickly escalates into a pretext for the gradual imposition of a pervasive surveillance system. Cameras, biometric checks and bureaucratic oversight seep into their world in small, almost imperceptible increments, a quiet accumulation that strips freedom away step by step rather than outlawing it outright.
Sora’s dystopia is understated yet oppressive. Robots and security devices populate the periphery, deliberately mundane, emphasising that modern authoritarianism often advances not through spectacle, but through monotony. Kou’s Korean heritage further sharpens the tension: his outsider status renders him particularly vulnerable to casual prejudice. A quietly charged street encounter, in which he is asked to present proof of citizenship, encapsulates the film’s insistence on realism. Discrimination, here, is procedural and almost invisible, yet the weight of its consequences is inescapable. These seemingly minor intrusions thread an undercurrent of anxiety through otherwise ordinary teenage routines, making the mundane feel fraught with risk.
Yet the film’s power is not solely in its social critique. The depiction of friendship is rendered with equal care. Kou, Yuta, and their circle inhabit a world of irritations, shared laughter, and fleeting triumphs of creative collaboration that feel lived-in and immediate. Their immersion in Tokyo’s underground techno scene – overcrowded basements, neon-lit clubs, improvised DJ sets – offers a vivid counterpoint to the drab, surveilled corridors of school life. Music becomes both an escape and an assertion of identity, a space where adolescence is performed with vibrancy and risk.
Ultimately, Happyend is a film about growing up under the unremarkable, but deeply consequential, pressures of a society that watches, records and categorises – yet it is also a celebration of teenage connection, creativity and the small rebellions that make life feel fully lived.
Christina Yang
Happyend is released nationwide on 19th September 2025.
Watch the trailer for Happyend here:
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