New Religion (Slamdance 2023) (Review)

Here we are, our concluding look at Slamdance 2023 with a movie that made a splash with the most adventurous viewers at last year’s Frightfest. Before that, though, the grand jury decided who is to be awarded the top honours.

Narrative Feature: “Waiting for the Light to Change” (Dir. Linh Tran)
Honourable Mention: “Where the Road Leads” (Dir. Nina Ognjanović)

Documentary Feature: “Starring Jerry as Himself” (Dir. Law Chen)
Honourable Mention: “Silent Love” (Dir. Mark Kozakiewicz)

Breakouts Feature: “The Underbug” (Dir. Shujaat Saudagar)
Honourable Mention: “Onlookers” (Dir. Kimi Takesue)

Episodes: “Palookaville” (Dir. Theodore Collatos)
Honourable Mention: “Off Fairfax” (Dir. Erica Eng)

We’ve also covered Punk Rock Vegan Movie, Stars in an Ordinary Universe and the Mad Writer. I chose to finish with Keishi Kondo’s film even though it didn’t win any honours simply because it is the film that put the event on my radar.

Where to begin with New Religion? In reviews from the festival circuit, it has been classified as a J-Horror, and although generically true, it doesn’t come close to describing what an elusive and slippery beast this work of art is. Horror is the closest place for this obscure and oppressive drama about the all-consuming nature of grief to sit. This is simply because it is the only genre space that makes sense. Just as you could say of a certain Mr David Lynch, what other shoe fits besides horror? And Kondo’s film is Japanese – so J-Horror it is.

Written & Directed by Keishi Kondo, New Religions sees Miyabi (Kaho Seto), a young mother whose daughter dies in a tragic accident after she falls from their balcony. 3 years later. She is working as an escort, still in the same flat, and she has a new boyfriend (Saionji Ryuseigun). Yet, she is empty. Her professional work is no life of glamour – the three escort girls wait in a dark basement in a building with flickering lights. None of them is in a great place, evidenced by one of the trio, Aiwaza (Daiki Nunami), mindlessly wandering into a killing spree with a Stanley knife. Aizawa goes missing, and Miyabi picks up one of her former colleagues’ clients – Oka (Satoshi Oka), a throat cancer survivor who speaks through booming subwoofers in a flat of either total darkness or bathed in uneasy blood red. He doesn’t have sex with these girls – he takes photos of them. Starting with her spine and working his way through the extremities of her anatomy, limb by limb, visit by visit. And with each visit, Miyabi becomes more and more emotionally and mentally compromised.

I have difficulty describing New Religion as a horror movie due to its wilful obscurity. Why? Because of its evasiveness away from classical storytelling beats, then there’s an aesthetic eye akin to a nightmare fugue state as directed by a less viscerally charged Shinya Tsukamoto. The street-level scenes in Tokyo Fist or Bullet Ballet should serve as fitting examples, they are visions of Japan as a depressed and dulled nation. And all of this fits in with the canon of sleep paralysis horror movies, another subcategory that isn’t the easiest genre fits.

Everything in New Religion is open to interpretation. All that is concrete are Miyabi’s child dies, she’s an escort, and she visits a weird guy in a tower block. Kondo has wonderfully captured that state of mind that someone experiences grief and trauma; what’s more, there’s a passing implication that none of these might be happening. Having experienced it myself, New Religion is one of the few movies in recent memory that captures the wooziness of depressive states so deep you don’t know which way is up. None of this is the terrain of accessible horror – this is psychological distress through art cinema. And it’s beautiful.

The music creates an aura of both oppressive and hopeful through Drone soundscapes by Akihiko Matsumoto, Miimm, Abul Mogard, and Zeze Wakamatsu. Drone has become a cliche of late, a lazy shorthand for oppressive atmospherics even though it’s a legitimate musical style with purveyors all over the musical map. From Stars of the Lid to Sunn o))), there’s something for all musical inclinations. A particularly thoughtful adoption comes in a club scene – Miyabi and ‘the boyfriend’ are dancing to music with beats as expressed by their movements but the music which scores it is a hopeful, buoyant droning soundscape. Memories and new experiences can be positive, but the hurt has numbed them all, contorting them into something away from reality. The cinematography is also stellar and makes the heightened use of red feel vital, as opposed to overplayed and meaningless as is often true in western genre cinema.

It’s fair to say, I’ve become an instant fan of New Religion. There are so many things that I haven’t touched, but to discuss them would be to wander into spoilers, and with Kondo’s debut not having a Uk release yet, that would be unfair to the film and its eventual audience. There’s something I have yet to mention: a film this complete, emotionally complex, and artistically ambiguous is someone’s debut. It will inevitably divide opinion as horror movies on the more artistic side of the spectrum do. Nonetheless, Keishi Kondo is a fantastic talent and one to keep an eye on.

Here’s hoping New Religion gets the Uk release that it deserves, as far as future film festival coverage is concerned – we have a number of reviews lined up for Glasgow’s Frightfest in March.

Rob’s Review – New Religion (Slamdance 2023)