Rave is resistance for the Japanese teenagers in Happyend

Midway through Happyend, the dystopian narrative debut of Japanese-American filmmaker Neo Sora, a pivotal confrontation takes place as two delinquent teenagers drag a stolen subwoofer through a foreboding metropolis.

Beneath a huge concrete overpass, which is lit up like a Brutalist spaceship, the budding DJ Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) reveals a pessimistic worldview when he challenges his friend Kou (Yukito Hidaka), an ethnic Korean and a regular target of police discrimination, over whether there’s any point in standing up for their rights in this bleak society. ​“You think fanatic yelling on the street can change anything?” Yuta exclaims. ​“The world is already over!”

Though the two one-time close friends continue to wrestle the massive speaker away from their CCTV-riddled and Big Brother-like school grounds, it’s evident that a chasm has opened up between them. Will their friendship have the same dependable fortitude as the looping beats and sequencers emanating from the subwoofer? Or are the pounding kicks and thumps the hammer on the immovable nail rupturing their bond? Sora, speaking over video call, explains that the subwoofer speaker ​“is like a visualisation of the elephant in the room between two friends… It’s meant to create the comforting low vibration of the bass and the kick in the club, and yet it is also quite like an earthquake.”

Sora had envisioned this symbolic speaker before he’d even began to write the story of Happyend. It became the groundwork for the movie as it developed into an Orwellian drama exploring identity, xenophobia, authoritarianism and resistance in a near-future Japan, where warnings of a looming ​“once-in-a-century” mega-quake are broadcast onto rainclouds in pink neon.

It’s fitting that techno-loving teens are the film’s fitting focal point, given the director’s background. Sora is the son of Ryuichi Sakamoto — the internationally-renowned composer whose former band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, are often cited, alongside Western acts like Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder, as forefathers of electronic pop music. (Sakamoto’s 1980 composition Riot in Lagos was described as the 6^th most important event in the history of dance music by The Guardian in 2011.) Sora directed the 2023 concert film Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus, documenting his father’s final performance before his passing. But despite this robust musical heritage, Sora claims it was actually during his studies at Wesleyan University (which happens to be the birthplace of MGMT) in Connecticut in the early-’10s that his passion was ignited. ​“I lived in a dorm room right above a space used for concerts,” he recalls of formative years spent rinsing the Night Slugs archives. ​“The subwoofer would rattle my bed and plates.”

Tremorous subtext is abundant in Happyend. The earth-shaking threat that the film’s politicians manipulate as a means to control society, for one, is rooted in the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake. One of the most destructive natural disasters in modern history, it was also a catalyst for the killing of thousands of immigrants in Japan after authorities circulated rumours accusing ethnic Koreans (whose country was a colony of Japan between 1910 and 1945) of violence, theft and arson.

“The long arc of Japanese colonialism underpins the movie,” Sora says, alluding to Happyend​’s explorations of xenophobia and identity while also likening this often swept-under-the-rug history to current events. ​“It’s intimately linked to what’s happening today in Palestine and Gaza… It’s the same structure, same issues, just playing out in different times.” Sora is outspoken for the Palestinian cause; he wore a keffiyeh and a Palestinian flag patch when Happyend debuted at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, and he’s been vocal about the art world’s silence on the conflict.

For the students of Happyend, on the other hand, techno is a benign act of rebellion in a society bent on conformity (One backstory, which was ultimately sidelined in the final edit, even suggested that most people in Happyend​’s near-future setting exclusively listened to music generated by AI). These are kids that wear chunky headphones around their necks like bling; who fawn over Funktion One sound systems in cavernous warehouse spaces housing illegal raves; and who sneak into their tightly-surveilled school’s ​‘Music Research Club’ at night to seize Pioneer DJ decks and play dutty beats until the sun comes up. It’s a language of resistance explicitly tied to the genre’s history, says Sora: ​“It’s impossible to talk about techno without talking about politics.”

One of Happyend​’s more wistful students yearns to emigrate to Detroit, the ​“techno mecca”, to study. ​“After the development of the automotive industry [in Detroit], the ​‘white flight’ happened, and these factory spaces emptied out,” says Sora, revealing his knowledge of dance music history. ​“They were reclaimed by the Black community [as places] to bring joy and liberation, and to make each other dance.” The original spirit of Detroit techno was ​“to be together in a place, and to dance and have fun”. But in Happyend, that culture is being increasingly relegated to history. The ravers find speakers gathering dust in deserted underground spaces strewn with posters advertising ​‘super-earthquake-resistant high-rises’.

Born and raised in New York, Sora enjoyed countless vacations to Japan during childhood, and he eventually moved to Tokyo in 2020. There are a number of reasons why Japan was the right fit for Happyend. Sora loves the genre of Japanese juvenile delinquency movies that followed the early ​’90s economic crash, which includes Battle Royale, Kids Return and Blue Spring, as well as Go and Pacchigi! – two films that, like Happyend, hone in Korean-Japanese tensions. ​“People literally just brought wooden swords to school and fought each other,” Sora laughs. ​“That’s so intense, right? But there’s something about the hairstyles and the uniforms and the smoking cigarettes in school [in these films] that I really love, so I really wanted to use that.”

Even more significant to Happyend​’s story are the unique connotations of the ​‘club’ as a social space in Japan. ​“You have this image of Japan as a place prioritising serenity, where quietness is a representation of politeness,” says Sora. ​“And so a club might be frowned upon… and get shut down because they are too loud or bothersome.” We talk about the long-standing ​‘Fūeihō’ law that, prior to relaxation in 2016, had given police a mandate to raid institutions where people were dancing too late in the night, or too vigorously. In the mid-‘10s, countless nightclubs went so far as to display ​‘No Dancing’ signs around their premises in response to a series of crackdowns. ​“And so clubs [would] spring up in the basements of parking lots,” says Sora, ​“and then they, too, are raided and shut down by police.”

The opening scene of Happyend depicts a rave in a car park space converted into a club, which is lit with kaleidoscopic strobes and soundtracked by a bare-chested DJ ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U (an IRL sensation whose January 2025 Boiler Room set went viral with 14m YouTube plays). But before long, the students are turfed out and detained by police as the venue is shut down. ​“Laws like ​‘Fūeihō’ are almost about how to maintain a ​‘proper’ society,” Sora explains. ​“But in reality, that’s just [part of] a face that’s put-on. You can read porno magazines in convenience stores [in Japan], and people talk openly about going to red light districts and engaging in sexual activity. Prostitution is a grey area, but in a way, it is legalised. It’s a really interesting contradiction.”

In Happyend, we hear brief snippets of tracks from Taiwanese techno label Sea Cucumber, and some incidental tracks inspired by experimental club acts like Emptyset and Dedekind Cut. But it is the recurring presence of Sakamoto-esque piano compositions like the tender LOVE (Variation 1) that turn out to be the movie’s most memorable drops. ​“His influence was inevitable,” says Lia Ouyang Rusli, who composed the film’s stunning score. ​“I can’t remember how I found my way to Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Naughty Boys, or his music for Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, but he’s one of my favourite contemporary composers.”

Rusli and Sora had circulated countless classical musicians between them as a bedrock for the movie’s more stirring sonic material. ​“I wanted the film to feel as if Yuta and Kou are in the future, reminiscing on these days in high school,” says Sora, who points to a sense of disquiet in the never-resolving melody of the Bach-esque piece entitled World. ​“The music is a reflection of the emotions going through their minds as they remember these scenes.”

When combined with the film’s world-weary themes, its resolute greyness, and the omnipresence of its Black Mirror-like technologies, it’s Rusli’s powerful main title theme, built on staccato synths, regal strings, dirging sub-bass and gut-punching kicks, that ultimately binds the film so powerfully. It’s one of the stand-out scores of the year — for its sonic richness, but also its sense of depth.

​“It’s music that communicates the scale of a historical era coming to an end,” says Sora, describing not the wider rhapsodies of colonialism, or even the nuanced evolutions of a musical subgenre, but a ​“more intimate” frontier that nods back to that central struggle with Yuta, Kou and the subwoofer. ​“It’s something that feels as grand as a shift in socio-economic politics,” he concludes: ​“their friendship.”

Happyend is released in the UK on 19^th September via Modern Films.