The germ for Makoto Nagahisa’s latest film was planted by the realization that the way the media approached the social issue of Toyoko kids brutally effaced the subjective reality of these ‘runaway’ children. The portrayal of these children as ‘crazy’ rendered the public unable to question the very societal field that produced these children, the machine that produces this ‘trash’.
After many years interviewing kids through a non-profit organisation that supports them locally, he turned what he learned – these children try to confront serious problems with a light-hearted and somewhat frivolous attitude – into a fictional narrative (Simons, 2026). For Nagahisa, it is only through fiction that one can truly emotionally evoke something of their subjective truths and touch upon the way their flight is a response to an Other (societal, parental) that fails them.
Burn, as a narrative, tries to reach behind the fiction of societal harmony to show the brutal misery caused by the failure of the ‘nurturing’ Other and explore a space full of abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and thievery where subjects try to find a space of belonging, a sliver of love. The children Makoto Nagahisa focuses on live on the societal edge, between life and death, between exploitation and being exploited, clinging on to some form of love and belonging to avoid falling prey to the voracious self-destructive void of abandonment. Nagahisa explores, with Burn, a space where the little flickering of light – whether real or but a mere mirage – is bound to be consumed by the shadows – the tunnel’s end is pitch-black. He re-affirms that, within this space, no true ‘relational’ light can be found and no productive symbolic bonds can be established. Yet, at the same time, Nagahisa implies with his title that a subjective kind of light can burn through the ever-threatening darkness.
Nagahisa opens Burn by letting his narrator, Jurie (Nana Mori), the girl who set Kabukicho on fire and caused an unknown number of fatalities, formulate a provocative invitation: “Hey, do you want to know? Why I set this place on fire”? We, as spectator, are unable to refuse – we want to know – and let her take us by the hand within her subjectivity representation of her past.
The flashback that follows Jurie’s appealing invitation sets the thematical tone of the narrative immediately. By contrasting the bright lyrics of the song her parents sing with the choir they are part of- “The world is bathed in light. Not a single shadow in sight.” – with the shadowy brutality of the familial dynamic at home, Nagahisa exposes how the parental subject’s investment in such bright mendacious fiction of societal harmony (soto) – a world without shadows – hides the shadowy reality of corporeal punishment the father subjects his children to (uchi).
What Nagahisa signals within this flashback that, within the religious patriarchal familial system, the position of the father (Kanji Furutachi) is most frail. The shadow that lingers within his subjectivity concerns the fact that he, utterly fixated on the ideal of fatherly authority – Le-nom-du-père, constantly feels like the (familial) other is out to undermine his position; sin is a stain that threatens his position. The recurring corporeal punishments and verbal violent utterances – “Your disorder is a reflection of your tainted soul.” – underline that he only attains a sense of authority by inscribing his ‘power’ into the flesh and mind of Jurie, Tina (Chise Niitsu), and his wife (Nao Matsuzaki) (Psycho-note 1).
After fleeing her parental home, Jurie finds some kind of sense of belonging in Tokyo with the kids that hang out around Toyoko-square – they call her Ju-ju due to her stuttering. What binds these youthful subjects together, what gives them a minimal support to stabilize their ego and manage their symptoms is, as Ora (Mei Takahashi) signals, a kind of shared (subjective) emptiness, a brutally echoing hollowness caused by the holes inflicted by a traumatizing Other (parents, peers, social environment, …). This space, established by Kami-kun or Kamijo (Wataru Ichinose), inaugurates a social defence that stops the subject from thrusting himself into his own ontological void and realize his own (self-)destruction; it is a space founded on a minimal re-affirmation of love: I’m glad you were born. Yet, while this space allows the troubled subject to cling to life, the seductive shadow of suicidal death and self-destructive impulses lingers within their signifiers and their ‘collective self-medicative’ rituals (e.g. the mixing of blue-coated sleeping pills in milky liquids to celebrate Ju-Ju’s joining and fleetingly escape the pain of one’s existence).
After ending up in the hospital by drinking too much of her celebratory cocktail, Jurie is placed within a temporary shelter where she meets Mitsuba (Aoi Yamada) – “Outcasts should stick together”. What the blossoming friendship between them signals or re-emphasizes is that the intimate yet frail consistency of these bonds is assured by the installation of an antagonistic presence that must be kept out. The bond is a shield that does not merely shuts the distrustful and traumatizing Other out, but generates intimacy by delineating a space of safe sameness – Us versus the adult world of parents, police officers, and so on.
Mitsuba’s turn to sugar-daddy dating and prostitution – her decision to put her body economically into play as an object of exchange – forms a solution to the distrustfulness of the Other. By turning sex into an economical transaction, by turning her body into the answer to a mere economical demand, she does not merely silence the Other’s puzzling desire, but is able to inaugurate a space where she can feel ‘momentarily’ loved. Yet, Nagahisa signals the dark truth behind her turn to prostitution with a brutally ironic romantic sequence in which Mitsuba talks about her dreams with her boyfriend Hikari (Hiroya Shimizu). With fleeting brushstrokes, he sketches out the trap laid out by the host-culture and exposes that, within consumerist culture, the desire to be loved can be quite costly.
Ultimately, the events Jurie is subjected to in this space that lies just underneath the fiction of societal harmony, the brutal confrontational stains that stain the societal field, the Other who indulges in his own harmonious fiction, pushes her over the edge. Nagahisa draws a visual parallel between Yurie’s bursts of violence and her father’s physical abuse to confront the spectator, as strange as it may seem, with the fact that their acts follow radically different logics. This difference is powerfully echoed within Jurie’s act of arson (Narra-note 1).
The societal critique Nagahisa delivers with Burn concerns what remains absent: the Other able to accept otherness. The spectator does not only get a sense that these children are left to their own devices – The Other does not only ignore the children on Toyoko-square or turn them into a mediatized social problem to be ‘enjoyed’ by the masses, but also remains faceless within the shelter, but are ever in danger of getting entangled with an Other that is out to exploit them and merely repeat their original trauma. Kami-kun might present himself as a welcoming ‘rescuing’ presence – I’m glad you were born, but underneath lies, in a certain sense, the cruel godly truth of the Old Testament.
Makoto Nagahisa proves, once again, that he knows how to craft visually compelling shot-compositions and exploit rich vivid colours-schemes to craft a visual fabric that pulls the spectator immediately into his narrative. What engages the spectator from the get-go into Burn is not simply the statement “Kabukicho is on fire. Number of fatalities unknown. Culprit is a teenage girl”, but the shocking contrast between this statement and the sparkly pink background.
The care that Nagahisa put in his composition is also evident at the level of lighting-design, in the elegant way in which he utilizes shifts in lighting to support and amplify his thematical fabric. By draping, for instance, the interior spaces of Jurie’s parental house in shadows, he does not only re-affirm the presence of ‘a realm of shadows’ within the subject but visually exposes the bright socialized image emanated to others as mendacious fiction. By letting shadows pervade the exterior spaces (e.g. Toyoko-square, …) in which Jurie wanders, Nagahisa does not elegantly evoke that she is unable to turn herself into the support of the societal fiction of harmony – she cannot brighten her surrounding with the societal fiction, but also that her own subjective shades of darkness (e.g. her violent wishes, …) colours her environment.
Nagahisa, however, does not only prove himself to be adept at crafting visually compelling dynamic and static moments by thoughtfully employing geometry and effectively contrasting compositional lines, but to surprise the spectator, at very turn, with fluidly integrated stylistic decorations (e.g. slow-motion, fast-forwarding, stop-motion effects, use of still photography, musical intermezzo’s, …) and potent pun-like moments.
Yet, Nagahisa does not merely craft something of a visual collage to visually please his audiences, but seeks to combine different styles to amplify the effect of his evocative play with signifiers (e.g. the flame-stamp) and breathe life into the emotional dimensions of Jurie’s trajectory. His creative eclecticism is his ‘weapon’ to submerge the spectator in Jurie’s psyche, her subjective logic, and in the world of these ‘unchained’ kids (Sound-note 1). The documentary-like hand-held sequence, for instance, does not merely aim to establish the societal reality of Toyoko-kids, but also echoes the reality of trauma that brought these troubled kids together, that impelled Jurie to seek Kami-kun out.
Burn is not only a filmic experience that re-affirms Makoto Nagahisa’s talent – propelling him to front of the stage where new Japanese directorial talent vies for attention, but an experience that has to be counted among the best, if not the best, Japanese film of this year. What turns his latest film into such an unforgettable treat is the effective way Nagahisa leverages the evocative power of visuals and sounds to plunge the spectator into a subjective experience of subjects who only appear as silenced within the media, with the expulsed human ‘trash’ produced by the contemporary societal Other.
Notes
Psycho-note 1: Nagahisa does not truly allow the spectator to understand why, after her husband’s death, the mother manifest herself as the aggressor. However, the reference to the ants, nevertheless, allows us to assume that she, as subject, felt forced to seize the ‘perverted’ fatherly function and perform it.
One could even say that she, to protect the consistency of the familial dynamic, must re-produce the fatherly violence, must re-produce the endless violent re-affirmation of his authority or, better, effacement of his castrated reality.
Narra-note 1: It is evident that Jurie’s two acts of transgression – the vicious attack on someone whom she considered her friend and the act of arson – do not aim to re-install or safeguard any kind of authority.
In a strange way, one can consider the first act where she loses all control and brutally lashing-out a desperate attempt to regain control over her dire situation. The act of arson, on the other hand, does not only constitute a cleansing of what her excessive violence confronted her with (i.e. the reflection of herself in her father’s corporeal punishment and the weight of his signifiers) and of the ‘criminal’ Other that hungrily embraced her, but also a self-endangering re-affirmation of her existence within the symbolic field that seeks to call forth a different Other and provoke a different answer that might allow her to reweave herself in a constructive way into the societal fabric.
Cine-note 1: There is one truly powerful shot in the second half of the narrative, a darkish shot that evocatively blends a sense of cityscape with the reality of a graveyard. The establishment of these two signifiers opens up a space for the spectator to question the impact of inhabiting a space on the edge of societal inscription within a consumerist society.
Sound-note 1: Nagahisa submerges the spectator in Jurie’s mental space not only through the visuals and by utilizing her as a non-diegetic narrator, but also by creating an effective harmony between his visual eclecticism and an expressive and effective sound-design – i.e. the thoughtful manipulations of sounds and aural soundscapes.
References
Simons, B. (2026, January 31). Sundance 2026 Interview: BURN Writer-Director Makoto Nagahisa wants his sophomore feature to affect you. ScreenAnarchy. https://screenanarchy.com/2026/01/sundance-2026-interview-burn-writer-director-makoto-nagahisa-wants-his-sophomore-feature-to-affect-y.html