THE STORY – Sakai is the assistant manager at a convenience store, his working days determined by routine. Without any hint of emotion, he deflects the annoying customers and follows the rigid rules that the store owner imposes on the staff. When the ambitious Ogawa is employed part-time, Sakai increasingly begins to question his role in the system. The monotonous world of the AnyMart gradually unravels until the boundary between life and death eventually becomes dissolved by the ghosts called forth by consumerism. Carried by current young Nippon stars, this feature debut by commercial filmmaker Yusuke Iwasaki, himself a son of a long-term store owner, uses a crazy mix of offbeat horror, socially critical drama, and absurd comedy to home in on fears about work as well as the feelings of powerlessness towards society, with which the younger generations increasingly see themselves confronted. In the midst of a sea of power lines and grey apartment complexes, the convenience store becomes a heterotopia. Is there still hope in the cold world of late capitalism, or must we eternally haunt the sterile aisles of the AnyMart, like chickens packed in plastic?
THE CAST – Melisa Sözen, Maryam Palizban, Hamidreza Djavdan, Mohammad Ali Hosseinalipour & Bacho Meburishvili
THE TEAM – Mahnaz Mohammadi (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
In much of Asia, convenience stores aren’t merely pit stops: they’re an ecosystem, and especially online food hauls or mukbangs from 7Eleven or FamilyMart are widely popular on TikTok. These shops glow through the night like secular chapels of late capitalism, stocked with cheap comfort and aggressively processed salvation. In Yusuke Iwasaki’s feature debut “AnyMart,” that glow curdles into something far more sinister. Set almost entirely inside the sterile aisles of a small Japanese convenience store, the film follows Sakai (Shota Sometani), an assistant manager defined by his near-total lack of affect. A tinny five-second jingle loops endlessly in the background: a sonic purgatory that slowly erodes the spirit. The building may be single-story, but there’s no real way out.
What begins as a bone-dry satire of service work leans into absurdity: employees recite daily pledges to customer satisfaction, minor mistakes are treated as moral failings, and the manager enforces strict grooming codes while punishing initiative. Under the fluorescent lights, independent thought feels like insubordination. The director frames the store with icy detachment, lingering on shrink-wrapped food and barren shelves as ominous sounds hint at something darker. A grotesquely grinning mascot hovers at the edge of the frame like a cheap corporate god. Outside of work, Sakai’s dates are just as bleak and mostly consist of conversations about dead pets and suicide statistics, draining the intimacy and warmth.
Then the tone fractures and the wry workplace comedy unravels into exaggerated, blood-soaked chaos, the violence outrageous yet pointed enough to underline a simple truth: these fluorescent aisles were dystopian long before the first drop of blood touched the floor. When a staff member is discovered dead in the storage room, the machinery of the store barely hesitates, and someone quietly ascends the hierarchy, the deceased reduced to an empty position to be filled while the register continues to chime as if nothing has happened. What lingers isn’t the shock of death itself but the shrug that follows it, shoppers sidestepping the disturbance as though it were a minor spill and co-workers lowering their gaze and carrying on, compassion treated less like a virtue than a structural flaw.
The film’s sharpest observation lies in its depiction of replaceability as a kind of moral contagion: employees are interchangeable because grief disrupts efficiency, and efficiency is sacred. A near-perfect worker is fired over a trivial misstep while the colleague who took his own life is erased from memory with startling speed. Iwasaki ties this pervasive numbness to rigid hierarchies and a deeply embedded culture of obedience within Japan’s corporate landscape, suggesting that the true horror is not concealed in the stockroom shadows but woven directly into the system itself.
For all its creeping nihilism, “AnyMart” holds tight to its razor-edged sense of humor. In one standout scene, a fisheye doorbell camera warps an employee’s meltdown into a grotesque spectacle that’s equal parts heartbreaking and darkly comic. Even when the blood flows, the film maintains a sly grin. The excess provokes nervous, complicit laughter without dulling the blade of its social critique. If the first half plays like a Romero riff drained of literal zombies, the second makes clear they were present from the start. They were just clocked in.
In the end, “AnyMart” almost elevates its genre mash-up into something genuinely transcendent. Yet, the final stretch leans so heavily into splatter that its razor-sharp social critique occasionally loses focus. Still, the film’s unwavering commitment to its vision and its uncanny ability to transform a banal convenience store into ground zero for moral decay is impossible to ignore. When it’s over, the jingle keeps looping. The shelves remain full. Customers continue to line up at the register. In Iwasaki’s grimly mordant universe, capitalism doesn’t require monsters to endure. It only requires opening hours.
