From "Battle Royale" to "The World of Kanako," the past 20 years of Japanese cinema have yielded countless examples of school kids behaving very, very badly. Director Eisuke Naito is a specialist in the genre: He started his career with the charmingly titled "Let's Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club," and subsequent films like "Puzzle" and "Litchi Hikari Club" have delighted in the antics of adolescent sociopaths.
In "Liverleaf," there's a whole gang of them: pupils at a rural middle school on the brink of closure, who've been finding ever more vicious ways to torment a recently arrived transfer student, Haruka (Anna Yamada). The bullies are keen to curry favor with the class's honey-blonde queen bee, Taeko (Rinka Otani), who was briefly friends with the new arrival, but now affects a bored disdain while tacitly encouraging her abusers.
Haruka's sole friend is another transfer student, Mitsuru Aiba (Hiroya Shimizu). A handsome loner, he spends his free time photographing the local flora, including the eponymous liverleaf — a hardy wildflower that endures the winter snows and blooms with the arrival of spring. Whether any of the class will still be alive by then, though, is another question.
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