‘Burn’ Review: This Shinjuku Odyssey Is Oppressively Nihilistic but Stylistically Undeniable

At the center of Shinjuku’s entertainment district, displaced young people can be found sitting around, encircled by plastic blue barriers. Some of them are addicts, some sell themselves for money, others are simply homeless. Locals call them “Tōyoko kids,” a portmanteau of “Toho” and “yoko” — meaning “beside” — because towering over this human holding pen is the Shinjuku Toho Building, a major theater owned by the Japanese film giant. These kids exist just outside of the cinema, but writer/director Makoto Nagahisa believes that they belong within it.

A Sundance veteran, Nagahisa has built his career on two principal trademarks — a kaleidoscopic stylistic flair sparked by his background in commercials, and a concern for the well-being of children rivaled in contemporary Japanese cinema only by Hirokazu Kore-eda. In 2017, Nagahisa’s first short “And So We Put Goldfish in the Pool” became the first Japanese film to win the festival’s Short Film Grand Jury Prize. In 2019, he returned to Sundance with his feature debut, juvenile grief dramedy “We Are Little Zombies.” His newest film, “Burn,” continues the primary preoccupations of the earlier feature, as the filmmaker expands his anthropology to the Tōyoko kids.

Jurie (Nana Mori) and her sister are trapped. At choir, their parents sing of a world bathed in light. Back home, their physically abusive father stalks the shadowy hallways. In an unlit room, the children are whipped and verbally chastized. Nagahisa and regular cinematographer Hiroaki Takeda capture these traumatic moments as frames within frames — doorways, mirrors, and corners as small windows seen at a distance — vertical rectangles like phone screens. It’s a device that recurs throughout the film, effectively communicating the way in which suffering is often willfully ignored. As spectators, we are cursed to be onlookers — powerless to help, despite our desire to. We cannot approach. We cannot be there with her. Jurie is alone.

The choir congregation appears to slow around her one day, and in that moment she runs. After DMing a social media account called “KAMI” that promises “24/7 help for lonely kids” in Tōyoko Square, Jurie makes her way into the city. Disturbed by the victim-blaming attitude of the domestic media, Nagahisa has set out to create a portrait of the Tōyoko community from their own perspectives. His street interview research breathes life into a believable menagerie of misfit kids.

There’s Wris, a serial self-harmer; Ora, a compulsive teeth-brusher who doesn’t eat; Haku, who’s said to have a “shot-glass bladder”; constant crybaby Kokoro; shy A-Q; and the onesie-clad jumprope kids dubbed “Animal Gals.” Jurie, christened ‘Ju-Ju’ for her stutter, joins them. The “Kami” in question is a seemingly generous man wearing a baseball cap and a warm smile. He provides the children lodging together in one small room, and at night he serenades them under the stars. “I’m glad you were born,” he refrains — no matter who you are.

The Shinjuku of “Burn” is disorienting and detached. Scenes are rendered with an diorama-esque economy of mise en scene that feels unreal, almost game-like — an aesthetic met with meaning in the film’s final act — and Nagahisa and Takeda take every opportunity to present the city from a different, often discomfiting angle. Protagonist and spectator are led by hand from location to location with a propulsive instability that echoes Ju-Ju’s rootlessness. Rico Iwai (LAUSBUB)’s extraordinary electronic score pulses and growls with a visceral, narrational ambience that feels as if it’s buried beneath the girl’s skin.

‘Burn’

Kabukicho is home, but it’s also hell. Every comfort is coupled with corruption: a place to rest comes with drugs; a new friend with the introduction of paid sex. Ju-Ju finds her first companionship in disabled teen Mitsuba (Aoi Yamada, queasily echoing Ju-Ju’s sister in appearance), who seeks to numb her to the emotional damage of prostitution in favor of the fast yen it can bring. Ju-Ju wants to raise a 10 million yen sum in a short span of time so that she can save her sister from the fate she herself ran from and, all of a sudden, the film morphs into a 2020s update of Hideaki Anno and Ryū Murakami’s seminal “Love and Pop.”

The resultant sex is witnessed in slivers at the side of the frame, and in startling split-second close-ups that are more explicit in their suggestion. The 24-year-old Mori appears far younger than her years, and these encounters are consequently skin-crawling to watch. The actress is committed to her role to a degree that is appropriately — and upsettingly — resigned. Her hollow eyes and unflinching face lend Ju-Ju a gut-wrenching passivity and naivete.

It’s a recipe for a bleak denouement, and, unfortunately, proceedings lean much too “Lilya 4-ever” from there. Nagahisa imbues these characters with such earthy, lived-in existences that it’s frustrating to see the back half of his film hit grim and well-worn trauma tropes in exasperating shock sequence, irrespective of the richness of the earlier character writing. One particular image of sex toy-based violence is especially troubling. Reality can be equally cruel, but, in 2026, we should question how many fiction features that languish in innocent young women being chewed up, abused, and spat out by the world we really need, especially from male directors.

The titular burning the whole thing down won’t soon leave your mind though — for good reason. Nagahisa ultimately blends the digital with the all-too-real in innovative, haunting, formally exhilarating ways; he should be canonized alongside Jane Schoenbrun and French director duo Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel. Reducing it all to rubble can frustrate, yes, but those burns leave a mark.

Grade: B-

“Burn” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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