Loss can be straightforwardly heartwrenching, but it could also be bewildering, cryptic, and too sudden to even process. New Religion depicts a grieving mother, whose loss of her daughter, and her meet up with an eccentric photographer, causes her to behave strangely. The film goes through the events in a surreal, existential haze, with a skin-crawling scene that reveals the photographer’s nefarious reasons, but the sequences remain inscrutable and the themes and certain characters don’t mesh as well as they could have. New Religion might befuddle viewers just looking for a casual watch, but it’s definitely a thought provoking and promising debut from Keishi Kondo.

New Religion clearly has interesting themes: loss, specifically the loss of a child, coping mechanisms, and denial. There’s something intriguing about how the women in New Religion, Miyabi and Akari, have gone through loss, and their loss is then taken advantage of by a photographer, whose photos make them essentially relive a life with the people they’ve lost– it feels like a reflection on the possible retraumatization of depicting loss, of the horrifying prospect of breathing new life, and of loss picking again at old wounds. That being said, the way the events are introduced feel cryptic but not scary or intriguing enough to make the story feel experiential. The only scary scene seems to be the one in the last 30 minutes, which would have felt utterly terrifying instead of just gross if the previous scenes were able to create, keep, and sustain any tension.