Happyend (2024) review

While Japan is bracing for a "one-in-a-century" earthquake, high school students Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and some of their classmates sneak into a club (before it's crashed by the authorities) and then play a prank on Principal Nagai (Shirō Sano) by arranging for his new sports car to face outer space like a rocket about to take off, but he gets even with everyone by installing an advanced surveillance system that violates their privacy.  Its depiction of edgy youth in the first act seems to me to be quite accurate, capturing their wildly fluctuating moods (from elation to ennui to defiance and so on), although it stumbles when it tries to cover the much-broader "political mood" of the nation, with several individuals discriminated against because of their race (and accused of not being "properly Japanese").  The kids protest their treatment and technically "win," but it arrives there in a rather roundabout way, and the defeatist tone weighs it down considerably.  Director Sora' father was the late, great Ryuichi Sakamoto, and it appears as if Pop's obsession with music was passed onto his son.