February 6, 2025

FILMHOUNDS Magazine

All things film – In print and online

A Look Into the Near Future – Happyend (London Film Festival 2024)

As an American-Japanese production that promises to examine a futuristic state of constant surveillance and government control from the perspective of the students in Tokyo, the very premise of Happyend sounds immediately exciting. From the little that was revealed about its plot before the film's world premiere at the , it became immediately clear how this film was going to focus on important topics that are becoming more and more contemporary in today's world. 

Set in Japan in the near future, Happyend focuses on a group of students made up of Yuta (Hayao Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaki), two inseparable best friends who have known each other since childhood, Tomu (Arazi), Ming (Shina Peng) and Ata-chan (Yuts Hayashi). The students also struggle with the new security system in the school, made possible through facial-recognition cameras, that keep constant surveillance on them and everything they do. As the film goes on, tensions grow around this system. 

Despite dealing with quite a substantial group of main characters, the film manages to explore all of them individually. Each of them is also drawn out as a character in their own right rather than simply as a member of the group or student on the school as everyone has a specific characteristic, hobby, or situation that makes them unique and memorable for the audience. 

The fear around a coming earthquake and the level of strict government control are the two pillars on which Happyend stands. In a world often shattered by natural disasters that seem to become more and more frequent and in which national governments seek to gain more individual power, all of this rings very true. Even more interestingly, there were quite a lot of films released in 2023 alone that reflect on the concerns around the use of new technologies to infringe on citizens' privacy while claiming to protect them. 

The movie does a brilliant job at showing how the system of face recognition cameras, cleverly named Panopty in reference to Foucault's Panopticon model, affects the everyday life of the characters. However, for all its talk about being a warning for the near future, as conveyed through the initial intertitles, Happyend could have easily also been set in the present. While this may be worrying on many levels given the dystopic look that near-future Japan is shown to have, the movie could have done a better job at creating a futuristic version of the world we already know. This is true, both visually, the technology looks virtually the same as cameras and screens we see today, and narratively. 

The film also does not seem to take a definitive stand on the themes it explores. While there is always this feeling that something big is about to happen, which is suggested from the very opening of Happyend, nothing ever does. While this could be a commentary on itself, as the students don't quite manage to subvert the status quo they are so desperate to change, this is only explored on the surface level. By the time the movie ends, the audience cannot help but ask themselves what actually happened. 

Ultimately, Happyend is a good film with a solid plot, but its science fiction elements could have been highlighted further and its commentary on present day anxieties could have also been portrayed better for an audience that undoubtedly shares some of the same worries and concerns. Nonetheless, the various themes it explores are still fascinating to see in the context of Japan, which a mainstream audience is not used to seeing portrayed culturally quite as much, and the anxieties and apprehensions specific to the country.

Happyend screened at the BFI