Eisuke Naito does not do gentle coming-of-age stories. From Liverleaf (NYAFF 2018) to Forgiven Children, his films treat adolescence as a pressure cooker of soul-crushing humiliation and ultraviolence. With Higuma!!, he sends the pressure cooker into the woods and drops a bear. Eighteen-year-old Sora’s life collapses when his father, ruined by ruthless scammers, dies by suicide and leaves the family buried in debt. College prospects disappear. Desperate for money, Sora drifts into the shadow economy that destroyed his family, joining a kidnapping job that curdles into murder and corpse disposal. Then the bear shows up: huge, scarred, and magnificently ill-tempered, tearing through a forest where human schemes look very small. Gruesome, bleakly funny, and uncomfortably close to recent Japanese headlines, _Higuma!! _bites with maximum nastiness.