‘Happyend’ Review: Friendship Isn’t Future-Proof in a Poignant Surveillance-State Allegory
variety.comJessica Kiang Japanese director Neo Sora is no catastrophist: the vision of dystopia he puts forth in his coolly compelling first fiction feature “Happyend” is chilling precisely because it won’t take some thunderous armageddon to bring it about.
Instead, in a near future that’s barely a stone’s throw from now, beset by many of our present predicaments and a sense of impending but not quite imminent apocalypse, his teenage heroes come of age as kids have always done.
It’s just that here, there is the added poignancy of experiencing the end of the beginning of life amid what might just be the beginning of the end of the world.
In tomorrow’s Tokyo, where the concrete curves and high-rise skylines have a slightly denatured air (perhaps because the film was largely shot in Kobe) a high-school principal (Shiro Sano) is distressed to discover his beloved sports car has overnight been set on its rear bumper, and now stands like a splashy yellow monolith in middle of the gray school courtyard.
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