Anymart (Imagine Film Fest 2026)

Corner shop, bodega, convenience store or konbini, whatever you call it, you’ll find the same style of condensed supermarket across the globe. Each have their own unique product lines, and spending time in any is broadly similar, which allows people to understand the experience in shopping in them, and explains why the ground swelling of horror stories from Japan based in konbini are about as accessible as Japanese horror gets. Earlier in 2026, prolific director Jirô Nagae’s The Convenience Store made its UK debut at Glasgow Frightfest, and a short trip away in the Netherlands, we now have the Dutch premiere of Yusuke Iwasaki’s directorial debut, Anymart.

The two main ways to experience a konbini are as shopper or a member of staff, and for the former, the shops are liminal spaces meant to be left immediately. For the staff, who are the main focus of Anymart, writer-director Iwasaki is able talk about the experience of working in retail while casting a satirical gaze at societal issues at large, and for much of the runtime, the film dabbles in a form of purely existential horror based on the treadmill of every day being the same. Being a firm fixture in town, Iwasaki also observes the struggles of being an independent business – the case in question being a bakery that deals specifically in Quiche that’s used to express the impermanence of your neighbours, something which leading man Shota Sometani (Sakai) is utterly ambivalent to. The movie spends time getting to know the people who work at this specific store, from the interview process and the mantra they recite before starting a shift, to their little quirks that make them them. For Sakai, we see his character development away from the shop – whether he’s in restaurants with his friends or on a string of skin crawlingly awkward dates.

FOR MORE ON ANYMART AND IMAGINE FANTASTIC FILM FESTIVAL CLICK THE POSTER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE REVIEW

Horror is an odd hole to place Anymart as, for the majority of its nimble 88 minute runtime, it’s more concerned with making a character of the shop, depicting it as a place that people only visit or work in because “it’s there” – not a dead end that just plugs gaps for the community. Whilst not an immediate fit, the film does have the same sort of woozy atmosphere that embodies so many liminal horrors so when weird stuff and violence start happening, it feels like a natural consequence rather than an unfortunate dissonance of slotting two completely different stories together. When horror does happen, its not because of some supernatural interference or a murderous psychopath entering this liminal space, but instead comes from certain characters reaching the end of their tether. The first major instance of this spins out from receiving the most benign feedback Sakai gives on a piece of audio drama when another character takes a little too much joy in the quiche shop going under, only for his hubris to have fatal consequences. Both are mere foreplay of one character breaking and going on the most low energy but efficient killing spree, so you could technically call this a slasher – albeit one where the killer has no sense of purpose or energy but has just had enough, something that people who’ve worked in retail can likely relate to.

Sakai is a lackadaisical sort, but a chance meeting with his attractive female colleague, Ogawa (Erika Karata), in a local restaurant (where another customer is comically battered to death with a frying pan after giving the most belittling feedback), and going to HQ for training has him feeling renewed and finding a level of joy that previously evaded him. When he returns to the shop he’s greeted with a scene of decapitation and death by skewer and fryer, and gives out a guttural, exasperated yell that says more than any dialogue ever could. The most horrific thing Iwasaki’s movie offers us is its ending as Sakai ends up working in another Konbini, but the look on his face is one of utter inescapable defeat, the ultimate in existential terror being that he’ll always work in this soul destroying trade

Given the themes and ideas at play, it will surely come as no surprise that Yusuke Iwasaki’s Anymart is slow, but that’s the point after all, with the same responsibilities, the same faces, the same corporately approved white box and products. Making the movie slow is part of the empathy exercise of putting you in the headspace of the ensemble, something furthered by the shots of actors addressing the gaze of the camera directly and peering deep into your soul. Still, slow is slow, and while it pays off neatly and with a dark sense of humour, spending time with characters robbed entirely of their joie de vivre does demand a lot of patience from its viewers to so 88 minutes are about the limit the movie could manage. The microcosm of Japanese society in the casting helps navigate this too, with Shota Sometani excelling in his latest eccentric role, Erika Karata’s presence lightening the entire movie, the brave unyielding smile of Nagashima Tatsuya’s company man saying so much about Japanese work culture, and their manager Nishimura Masahiko – the end game of it all. They’re all excellent, and experiencing their conformity to capitalism is truly horrific, bringing me right back to my days of stocking shelves in a local Morrisons, a time I’d rather forget.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – ANYMART (2026)