‘New Religion': Chic debut is low on shivers

Japan Times

17-07-2025

Horror movies tend to be most chilling when they take a seemingly normal setting and then violate it. Films that already start deep in the uncanny valley have to work much harder to unsettle their audience.
That's an issue for 'New Religion,' Keishi Kondo's confidently executed but curiously underwhelming debut feature. It takes place in a world that's been knocked off its axis. Characters speak to each other in affectless tones like they've been hypnotized. Scenes are bathed in intense color schemes borrowed from Nicolas Winding Refn, accompanied by a near-constant pedal drone of dread. And that's before things start getting weird.
Maybe this is all a projection of the film's traumatized protagonist, Miyabi (Kaho Seto), whose young daughter takes a fatal tumble off the balcony of their apartment in the opening scene. Several years later, Miyabi is working as a call girl and still living in the same home, though she now shares it with an unnamed, music producer boyfriend (Ryuseigun Saionji, from madcap electronic outfit BBBBBBB).
After one of her coworkers goes on a stabbing spree, Miyabi pays a call to the last client the woman visited before she snapped. Oka (Satoshi Oka) proves to be quite a character: He speaks through an artificial larynx wired up to a loudspeaker system and lives in a tomb-like dwelling where a video about moths plays on repeat. Classic serial killer material, in other words.
However, rather than hack Miyabi's body into pieces, Oka proposes to catalog it in a series of Polaroid photos, starting with her 'barbarous' spine. Any sane person would do a runner. She keeps going back for more.
Seto has the icy beauty of a younger Rie Miyazawa, which serves her well in a role that mostly calls for blankness, while Oka — making his screen debut — is a uniquely sinister presence. Saionji, as the hapless boyfriend, is one of the only characters here who could pass for normal.
'New Religion' seems to have been shot during the COVID-19 pandemic and it captures the fraught, claustrophobic vibe of that period. This gets bundled up in a story of dreamworlds and doppelgangers, with shades of Edogawa Rampo, Shinya Tsukamoto and Kiyoshi Kurosawa (plus a pinch of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers,' just for good measure).
Any film that gets touted as the future of J-horror — as this one has — is saddled with impossible expectations. 'New Religion' is markedly different from another recent contender to that title, Ryota Kondo's 'Missing Child Videotape,' which was a little too beholden to the genre's late-1990s and early-2000s zenith.
Kondo's approach is more radical. If this feels like a throwback to anything, it's to the artistically ambitious, mostly non-Japanese films of the 2010s that came to be known as 'elevated horror.' But the same complaints that dogged many of those movies apply here as well. While I admired the boldness of Kondo's aesthetic and the loftiness of his concepts, I also found 'New Religion' ponderous and overly affected.
The film's enveloping soundscape isn't all that different from what David Lynch and Alan Splet did with 'Eraserhead' nearly 50 years ago, but the most effective use of music is a haunting piece by Italian producer Abul Mogard that features twice, during the rare moments when some recognizable emotion pierces through the artifice. 'New Religion' is weird, all right, but it's wearying, too.