This article appeared in the November 27, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Happyend (Neo Sora, 2024)

“Two boys carrying a big subwoofer through a megalopolis.” For Japanese filmmaker Neo Sora, that was the foundational image for his new feature, Happyend, a standout at this year’s New York Film Festival. The boys in question, Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka), are high-school best friends and music fanatics; the subwoofer is school property they’ve stolen; and the megalopolis is a near-future Tokyo—a city of gleaming skyscrapers, gigantic overpasses, and orderly, vacant streets. In this homogenous architectural landscape, Yuta and Kou are subversive figures. After the high-school principal (Shirō Sano) disbands the students’ “music research club” and throws their sound system in storage, the boys begin rebuilding their hangout space in a hidden cranny of the city, a former DIY nightclub recently shut down by the cops.

The music research club and illegal nightclub are twin spaces, havens where alternative culture thrives until the authorities stamp it out. Sora frequently deploys doubling as a narrative strategy in Happyend, as he allegorizes the power structures of a city in crisis through a coming-of-age tale set in a private high school. The story begins when Yuta and Kou pull an elaborate prank involving the school principal’s shiny new sports car, and the administration retaliates by installing a high-tech surveillance system in the interest of “safety.” Meanwhile, Japan’s prime minister is employing similar tactics on a larger scale: under threat of an impending earthquake, he expands his executive powers and fuels anti-immigrant fervor, all in the name of keeping citizens safe. The film’s dual narratives draw out the ways in which authoritarianism emerges from—and often actively manufactures—crises.

The speculative Tokyo of Happyend is conspicuously empty. Whether the teens are dragging the stolen subwoofer through the streets, sleeping on rooftops, running from the cops, or walking home from school, it feels like they have the city to themselves. At times this desolate landscape evokes a radiant sense of freedom, with wide-open spaces where the characters can flex their burgeoning agency. But the film constantly reminds us that menacing forces underpin all this apparent peace and quiet. As Yuta and Kou make their way to the nightclub, an announcement rings through loudspeakers en route: “The emergency decree is in effect. For your safety, please refrain from unnecessary assemblies.” For the prime minister, streets bereft of people are streets bereft of protest. “Quiet cities are scary, aren’t they?” Yuta says. A climate of fear hangs over urban stillness, as both its cause and its effect.

The spectacle of an empty city is a staple of “last man on earth” movies, and Happyend courses with postapocalyptic anxiety. “The world is already over!” Yuta informs Kou. But the bare streets of Tokyo also evoke another kind of speculative metropolis: the “smart city,” with its techno-futurist visions of a frictionless, optimized urban existence. In Happyend, technology is primarily a tool for control. Police use facial-recognition software to conduct random citizenship checks, while the school’s “Panopty” surveillance system perceives and automatically punishes even the smallest of student infractions. A sparse, orderly municipality is the smart city’s logical end point—a place where nightlife, activism, and teen rebellion are all inefficiencies that tech has ironed out.

Happyend’s vision of urban quiet in a place as densely populated as Tokyo is, of course, not entirely speculative. During the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, images circulated widely of formerly busy streets that became suddenly vacant. These exceptional conditions destabilized people’s relationships to their cities, in ways that persisted even as lockdown guidelines loosened. How do we reoccupy public space after such a period of estrangement? This question animates Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s bluish, a highlight of the Currents section at this year’s NYFF, which pictures a city, Vienna, and a generation in a state of emergence. The film follows two unnamed young women—a university student (Leonie Bramberger) and an immigrant (Natasha Goncharova)—just past their teen years, who seem to be undergoing a second adolescence. They are learning the rhythms of social connection and urban living anew, after a break that is never explained or referenced explicitly, but which draws on still-vivid memories of the pandemic.

Emptiness in bluish is more existential than literal, manifesting in the characters’ loneliness, trepidation, and yearning. Desire bubbles beneath the student’s placid demeanor as she cautiously explores the opportunities for contact that are rife in public spaces: she makes eyes at a baby in a waiting room, rests her head against a stranger’s shoulder on a bus, and, while waiting in line at a takeout window, tucks in the shirt tag of someone standing in front of her. The film turns these tiny moments into miracles—even a doctor’s clinical touch is framed as something precious. In the locker room of a local rec center, the student observes a pair of older women who swim together every week. They’re completely at home—at the pool, in their bodies, and with each other. She senses, perhaps, a generational difference in social integration and ease with public life. During a Zoom lecture, her professor names “collaborations and collectives” as a future discussion topic, a slightly ironic subject for a fully remote course. bluish continually puzzles over the possibilities for togetherness in an age when collective existence often feels just out of reach.

Near the beginning of the film, we navigate through central Vienna on Google Street View, led by an unseen user. We pause; turn a corner; look at the buildings, the trees, the cars, and the people. Then we move further down the block, taking in the neighborhood through a virtual rendering. The Street-View version of Vienna is silent, static, and controlled. It makes an unpredictable city, still shaken by crisis, feel safe, familiar, and responsive to the navigator’s commands; the user in bluish seems to be seeking a sense of comfort, rather than a route or an address. Later on, the film’s other protagonist, a newcomer to Vienna, zigzags along a sidewalk, her eyes glued to her phone, her little dance easily recognizable as that of a pedestrian following directions on a digital map. bluish locates this floundering gesture as a sign of life; for all the numbing effects of perpetual phone use, our digital behavior is only too human.

Blue light is light with short wavelengths. The term is most commonly used in reference to the light emitted by electronic devices. In bluish, it illuminates the protagonists’ faces as they sit in the dark, scrolling on their phones. The color also seems to follow the characters around. There are blue walls, doors, sweatshirts, TV screens, nails, and eye shadow, and the cinematography by Antonia de la Luz Kašik subtly emphasizes the azure dimensions of daylight. As the virtual world increasingly mediates the physical one, the film suggests that cities themselves seem covered in a digital wash that distorts the immediacy of urban life. Against this backdrop, small irregularities stand out, like lonely strangers exchanging gentle touches, or teenage troublemakers pushing a stolen subwoofer through the night. These incidents create ripples in the urban surface that our technological infrastructure and political elites strive to keep smooth.

Julia Gunnison is a writer and editor who lives in New York.