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 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.