SIFF 2025: Happyend // Cloud

Happyend
dir. Neo Sora

Carves a neo-fascist dystopian cyberpunk landscape out of negative space, a lo-fi exploration of disaffected youth in the spirit of Blue Spring or Rebels of the Neon God. Adolescence in search of catharsis and connection pushed into authoritarian structures and regressive ideals, the throes of angst and self-discovery interrupted by the past being forced on the present. Xenophobia enforced by outmoded practices seeps through the social fabric and imprints on those who have no frame of reference for such destructive othering, pushed by nightmarish technological overwatch that restricts expression. Music as the only escape, headphones and subwoofers a portal to another world where the thudding bass and driving synths elevate experience beyond such a restrictive plane of reality. Fitting that Neo Sora would be able to so expertly explore the atmosphere of music against oppression, but he wields it with a heavy futurism, thinking forward to a not-so-distant future where data can be wielded instantaneously and destructively. Happyend is appropriately bittersweet, acknowledging the sorrowful wash of time as we grow older and grow apart from each other, but also defining the power of collective action as the only effective tool against the ever encroaching threat of fascism, often sold beneath the guise of protection until it becomes too late to find those liminal moments of catharsis. Sometimes, "eat shit and die" is the only appropriate response to authority.

Cloud
dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Reframes Kurosawa's scattered fascinations through an icy contemporary lens, blending ideas he's been toying with for decades into a sensational powder keg of impending violence. The easy connection here is the disaffected loneliness depicted in Pulse, now translated to a modern image of how the internet isolates and radicalizes, the way our frustrations are so easily manifested through anonymity, the way that the churning gears of capital consume and consume until the angry and the desperate have nothing left to lose. But Cloud also maintains shades of Kurosawa's whole catalogue, the infectious violence of Cure, the mournful domestic suffering of Retribution, the illusory social structures of Creepy, the collective ego death and light tinge of magical realism of Charisma. The angle that feels so refreshingly novel here is the grim, surrealist comedy, the way that Kurosawa approaches each moment with a wry, cynical bite, dredging laughs from the disaffected inanity of it all. This is a film of irredeemable characters, jumping to commit their next act of blind violence if they aren't busy fleecing someone else in search of their next payday. The world swirls and churns around every penny that can be flipped and profited off of, transactional existence taken to the logical extreme of anonymous financial ruin to tangible physical violence. Search for the entrance to hell all you want – you're already living there.

SIFF 2025 takes place from May 15-June 1, 2025. Find out more information about the fest here, and find continued coverage here on Step Printed.