NEW RELIGION. A hypnotic horror for fans of Lynch and Cronenberg

A study of despair after loss? A vivisection of madness? A ghost story? Body horror? New Religion raises many questions while offering few answers.

Miyabi lives with her husband and young daughter in an apartment building in an unnamed Japanese city. One day, while reading a book, she briefly takes her eyes off her daughter, who is watering plants on the balcony. The child loses her balance on a step stool, falls over the railing, and dies instantly. Miyabi divorces her husband, finds a new partner, and takes a job as an escort. One of her clients is a mysterious man who takes Polaroid photos of different parts of her body: her spine, feet, hands, and so on. After each visit with this man, Miyabi feels haunted by the ghost of her deceased daughter—and she senses a connection with the Polaroids. Each body part that is photographed seems to experience the presence of her child. When the man takes a photo of Miyabi’s eyes, she finally sees her daughter. But the enigmatic photographer harbors a dark secret: it’s revealed that his previous “model” began killing random people.

New Religion is the feature-length debut of Japanese director Keishi Kondo, who—according to online sources—had previously made only a short film, See You Again (2020). In the 2022/23 season, New Religion entered the festival circuit and received three nominations for Best Feature Film: at the Warsaw Film Festival, Slamdance Festival, and Osaka Asian Film Festival. Despite recognition from jurors and the few critics who saw Kondo’s film, it didn’t achieve wider theatrical distribution. However, this didn’t stop the director from beginning work on a spin-off of New Religion, a short film titled Neu Mirrors. In February 2024, a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter successfully raised approximately 788,000 yen, more than twice the initial goal, allowing Kondo and his team to finish the project. This proves that New Religion has its audience.

And yet, it’s not an easy film. What exactly are we watching? Who is the photographer? Has the protagonist lost her mind, or is she truly visited by her daughter’s spirit? And what does the title mean? Kondo offers no clear answers, though he provides clues. The omnipresent symbolism of butterflies suggests themes of transformation, metamorphosis, death, and rebirth. Another thread involves the blurring of the line between reality and dreams, reflected in a paraphrase of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi’s parable about a sage who dreamt he was a butterfly, and upon waking asked himself: is he a man dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man? The film’s use of color is also striking—particularly blood red, which evokes love, eroticism, and passion, but also sacrifice, blood, and danger. In Japan, red holds special significance: it’s the color of torii, the gates of Shinto shrines that symbolize the passage between the world of the living and the afterlife.

The film’s enigmatic content corresponds to its form: Kondo creates an impenetrable, hypnotic atmosphere through meticulously composed shots saturated with contrasting colors (in addition to red, these include cool blues and pristine whites). The soundscape also plays a crucial role in amplifying the emotional tone of individual scenes—not just through sound design, but also the ambient, drone, and electronic music score. One of the most haunting scenes features the track Half Light of Dawn by the acclaimed Italian composer Abul Mogard. New Religion evokes the spirit of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure (1997), Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) and Mandy (2018), the dreamlike visions of David Lynch, and even the body horrors of David Cronenberg. Despite these parallels, Kondo speaks with a voice of his own. What is he saying? That’s a question viewers must answer for themselves.