Maxance Vincent
Yusuke Iwasaki’s AnyMart is the reason why I go to the Fantasia International Film Festival. Premiering in the Cheval Noir section, this Japanese comedy starts out as a relatively mundane, Ozu-esque slice-of-life picture as we follow convenience store employee Sakai (Shota Sometani) in his day-to-day tasks working in a branch of the AnyMart chain owned by his father (Masahiko Nishimura). With pillow shots aplenty, Iwasaki focuses mostly on the mundane and the quotidian and draws comedy from situations that are highly similar to Kevin Smith’s Clerks. The people who work in the store don’t really want to be here but haven’t found any better employment and must force themselves to keep the AnyMart running, despite a slew of absurd situations that occur throughout the day.
You’ve seen this type of movie before, both in Japan and America, and there was a moment where I thought that Iwasaki was blowing it. Yes, it’s funny, and there are some scenes in the opening half of AnyMart that had the whole crowd laughing, but it didn’t feel like one was viewing something truly unique and singular, which was touted by programmer Nicolas Archambault while introducing the film and its director, who was in attendance during its North American premiere. The aesthetic is minimalist but effective, but I was afraid that such a movie, while brief in runtime, would run in circles and start to exhaust itself by the time it reached its halfway point.
Thankfully, this does not happen, because Iwasaki slowly plants the seeds that something darker is lurking beneath the AnyMart and within the characters’ psyches. While the façade of the film looks as comforting and inviting as Yasujirō Ozu meets Kevin Smith, the writer/director slowly begins to excavate the morbid corners that are smartly introduced in that rudimentary opening half, if you pay close attention. Some of the aesthetic choices distort faces, the way the camera lingers on a given character creates a discordant sense of tension, and, most importantly, the store manager is worried that no one is following the corporate protocol to the letter.
That will come in handy during a finale that no one – not even myself – expected, but as AnyMart begins to explore its dark corners, it also becomes morbidly funny, and painfully horrifying. Iwasaki begins to discuss a very real and pressing subject: the horrors of corporate employment that so many of us are boxed into, and how it can lead to a cyclical life of misery and regret. By doing so, he taps into themes that are extremely sensitive and vulnerable and could potentially trigger viewers who might relate to the plight that AnyMart workers attempt to hide with their smiles. He plays with a morbid sense of humor that few directors would dare, including an unexpected death scene that had the entire audience laughing and cheering.
It is warranted because there’s a certain buildup and payoff that comes with a sequence like this. However, at some point, AnyMart becomes no laughing matter and morphs into something else entirely, akin to a Kiyoshi Kurosawa horror picture, which Iwasaki admits to being inspired by. It’s at that point where the movie becomes the Fantasia picture we’ve been waiting for: bold, unapologetic genre entertainment that takes massive swings and embarks the audience on unexpected and surprising territories. On the tenth day of the festival, something so original and daring projected inside the Hall auditorium felt genuinely invigorating, especially in seeing how the audience responded to the picture, with one member during the Q&A calling it “one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s kind of a miracle that such a movie as AnyMart works so well. A picture like this could only function if the director fully commits to the bit of smashing Ozu, Smith, Kurosawa and Grand Theft Auto (yes, yes) together and never relents. Thankfully, Iwasaki is in perfect control of his aesthetics and emotional progression. He knows how to lure the audience into his strangely compelling movie by first setting how it’s going to work (it’s essentially a series of vignettes for 88 minutes) before pulling the rug out from under us and subverting our initial expectations.
Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2026 Berlinale, AnyMart signals Iwasaki as a director to watch, and it will hopefully be the first of many premieres we will see from him at Fantasia. If anything, it was the jolt of energy we needed to remind us of what this festival can do at its best, and of its importance in exposing audiences to never-before-seen genre cinema for us to celebrate and, ultimately, champion, upon their release. Que le film commence!
SCORE: ★★★1/2
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