If Kiyoshi Kurosawa Made ‘Skins,’ it Would Look a Lot Like ‘Burn’ [Sundance 2026 Review]
Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn is a Sundance all-timer. It’s fitting that the film both opens and closes with Ju-Ju (Nana Mori) burning everything around her to the ground. This is the festival’s last year in Park City, Utah, and Burn closes this chapter of the seminal festival with a stunning, incendiary, haunting, and masterful mix of genres. It’s not to be missed.
Ju-Ju endures years of traumatic abuse, first at the hands of her father, and then later—after he is spirited away, perhaps by Ju-Ju’s own prayer—at the hands of her mother. She leaves her sister behind and flees to Kabukicho, corralling with a wayward band of youths, some as young as elementary schoolers, some much older. They warmly embrace Ju-Ju, unbothered by her stutter or the often literalized “curse” she feels she embodies.
Nagahisa, who also penned the script, borrows the diegesis of horror, though Burn is not, in the strictest sense, a horror movie. There are no ghouls or goblins, no masked killers or shadowy specters. Yet, the entirety of Burn is oppressive, evocative in the way only horror is, with auditory cues and staging pantomiming the look and feel of a horror film, successfully imbuing its harrowing, all-too-real story with a haunting melancholy that calls to mind the films of George Sluizer or Nicolas Roeg.
The verisimilitude, alongside terrific stylistic choices ranging from varied frames-per-second to meaningful, yet gut-wrenching animation, boasts intention without pretense. It simply is because it needs to be. The culture of Tokyo street youths, the hustle of earning an income, and the horrors of public restroom abortions, of missing cash, and obscure men rendered God in their ability to provide (and groom).
And Burn, for all its whimsy, is notably dark. Graphic, unflinching, frightening, and heartbreaking. The film is labyrinthine and precise in its castle of glass, which, undoubtedly, is going to crumble. The antics, the jingles, the POV-dildo shots— Nagahisa intends to disorient, to disrupt, and to break through your rib cage, grab hold of your heart, and squeeze it until it bursts.
Bursts, perhaps, into an inferno of pink flame where God is dead, and life is rendered stop-motion, a diorama of pain and suffering, with no way to regain control. Burn is, in the most complimentary terms, the equivalent of Kiyoshi Kurosawa directing Skins (or Euphoria, for the younger crowd). So much so, one haunting beat in particular is so beholden to the imagery and rhythm of Kurosawa’s ghosts, I was in awe, confident I was in the presence of a true, new master of the uncanny.
Burn is cursed. We are, too. This is nightmarish filmmaking of mammoth proportions, so assured, so confident, so technically stunning, it’ll no doubt linger in my mind for years, a curse unto itself. Nagahisa’s masterclass will burn—I just hope you’re ready to handle it.
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Burn
Summary
Makoto Nagahisa’s Burn disorients, disrupts, and breaks through your rib cage, grabs hold of your heart, and squeezes it until it bursts
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