[FrightFest] Review: New Religion
Keishi Kondo’s New Religion follows the aftermath of a young mother losing her daughter in an accident. This Japanese art film combines horror and science fiction influences with visually stunning cinematography. Kondo explores the metaphorical boundaries between dream and reality — distortions of the young mother’s mind as she grapples with emotions, memories, and her own personhood in the wake of her daughter’s death. New Religion paints a picture of a young woman coping with the haunting imagery of trauma through waking fantasy and dreaming.
After Miyabi’s (Kaho Seto) daughter accidentally falls from the balcony, she feels lost and confused. Unable to find work after her divorce, she lives with her boyfriend (Saionji Ryuseigun) and works as a call girl to make a living. While picking up her colleague after an appointment, Miyabi violently starts killing people, causing unease in the society. In her colleague’s sudden absence, Miyabi inherits all of the other woman’s clients,and she meets a weird and mysterious customer. Oka (Satoshi Oka) invites Miyabi to his place and makes an unusual request: to take a picture of her spine. After a moment of hesitation, she allows him to take her picture, and this continues with him requesting to take more of her feet, arms, and face. But the more Miyabi engages with Oka and his requests and asks her to acknowledge her dead daughter, she is driven into a dream-like state, where she alienates herself from the rest of the society.
New Religion is a haunting portrayal of Miyabi’s survival and the measures she takes to bring her daughter’s presence back into her life. The movie demonstrates how blurred the lines are between dreams and reality. It’s an exciting concept to explore and show these boundaries within the narratives of maternal trauma, grief, loss, and delusion. In Miyabi’s case, she realises that by engaging within the boundaries of fantasy and reality, however strange it looks to those around her, she gets to be closer to her daughter. But the dangerous part about this is that she completely loses herself in the process. The mysterious man she meets one day encourages her to talk to her dead daughter, and even the characters around her warn her of the consequences, especially since Oka’s previous call girl went on a violent rampage after their sessions. Perhaps, what Kondo is suggesting is that the dream-like reality harms Miyabi and submits her to pain, a life of lawlessness and daring her to be aggressive towards others. Her dead daughter’s ghost emerges through the reconstruction of the polaroids. Miyabi longs to be on the beach with her daughter, where they were the happiest, and through these polaroids, her dead daughter comes back.
The concept is attractive and conjures an incredible execution of illusion versus reality. New Religion has nuanced performances by Seto and Oka, and the latter keeps the audience guessing about his true motivations. His performance is impressive, with a menacing and conniving nature whose strangeness radiates through the screen. The true intentions of the peculiar stranger are revealed at the end of the movie, which might be predictable for some viewers. New Religion is an interesting story that shows the boundaries between dreams versus reality. It uses abstract imagery, mostly shot in a red-lit room to show the horror elements and adds danger and tension to the film. But given the narrative storytelling and the abstract visuals, the film is original and explores the dream-within-a-dream concept by reconstructing the memories using photographs. The film is a slow, but intimate look at a young mother’s sense of self and the loss of autonomy at the hands of dream figures.
