THIS IS A SPOILER-FREE REVIEW WITH ONLY A VERY BROAD PLOT SYNOPSIS

One of the key facets of Japanese cinema has for decades been a marked cyclicality, a return and revisiting of earlier genres, films, modes and movements. A recent slew of remakes of notable classical works like Tokyo Story (1953), The Crab Cannery Ship (1953) and Fires on the Plain (1958) attest to this practice, as do generic trends in the Samurai film and yakuza film among other genres; and the case of J-horror has been no exception. Its emergence on the international stage following works like Ringu (1998), Pulse (2001) and Ju-on: The Grudge (2001) was quickly adopted as a cornerstone of a brand of Japanese cinema that buttressed the Asia Extreme DVD label that has recently been argued to represent a problematic variation of Western Orientalism.

If this (convincing) charge were to be prosecuted, then Shimizu’s Sana would not be a case for the defence. Nor would it be employed to present a counter argument to Japanese cinematic cyclicality. Following on the heels of a loose trilogy of works (known collectively as the village tripartite) that saw the creator of the (still-ongoing) Ju-On franchise seeming to lean heavily into a different style of horror cinema, Sana (2023) immediately signalled a return not just to the climate of late 1990s/early2000s J-horror but more specifically to Shimizu’s own career-making works. There are, in particular, a litany of variously explicit – cosmetic or otherwise – references to his Ju-on films that make Sana and its sequel feel almost like a greatest hits compilation – or perhaps a cover version; and if the language used here alludes to the music industry then this entirely apt for a film whose narrative revolves around a J-pop band (real-life band Generations) and their members being variously besieged and haunted by the ghost a young girl whose death at her home is the catalyst for a grudge that spreads from beyond the grave.

The convoluted backstory to these hauntings emerges through a fractured narrative (itself a marker of a debt to Ju-on) that incrementally fills in the background to the title character’s death. Said demise is among the least convincing aspects of a narrative that, it has to be said, is not short of unconvincing moments. As in Ju-on The Grudge (and The Curse before it) the family home is at the epicentre of the not especially mysterious mystery, and this house remains the epicentre of the spectral chaos, the eye of a storm that unwinds with a centrifugal force out and around the city. Music is a further motif, given that a cassette featuring a specific tune is integral to the plot. This effective throwback to a pre-digital artefact echoes the return of the title character, and by extension the videotape in Ringu. The sense here, unlike Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001), is of an age that seems increasingly remote, alien. As in Suzuki and Nakata’s work there is convoluted history, yet the backstory in Sana has no comparable reach back into the early modern era and the contemporary manifestations of modern religion and science that would develop and impact the modern world. Shimizu’s less grandiose exposition suggests a history that is barely historical – a past that is not even past – where Japan seems to be folding in upon itself. The effect of this structure, elaborated upon in the sequel, is to implicitly question Japan’s     

Alongside Generations is comedian Makita Sports as a Private Investigator, largely a functional character whose investigation loosely structures the story. He interviews the members of Generations in a hotel, an effective space to juxtapose with the haunted house that is here the horrific ground zero in that it feels open, communal, welcoming. The presence of an official investigation also adds a neat twist to the chaotic personal emotional baggage that seeps through the cracks of the generally doomed formalities of trying to unpick an otherworldly mystery.

This contrast also underlines a sense of music as business as much as art. The device for recording the haunted melody escapes the confines of the here and gone specificity of streaming to speak to something at once both permanent and transient – there to be owned yet fallible, subject to individual deterioration – as Humans becoming ghosts seem here to also be. Ghosts themselves can be said to be recordings, replays and re-viewings, echoes of something that once was, something that flickers into sporadic ‘life’ so long as it is seen (something Nigel Kneale in particular began long ago to explore – and explore very well) or in this case heard. It gets to the heart of the resonance and relevance of horror cinema, and it is something that festers in the subtle, very Shimizu-esque, small scares and creepy moments of this film.   

If this imparts an idea that Sana is better thought about than watched then, well, that is not entirely wide of the mark. The sequel, Sana: Let me Hear (2024), perhaps ironically given the title, almost entirely moves away from any musical focus. There is a quasi-motif with piano playing but, really, nothing else. Certain key scenes from the first film are replayed and extended here – a death at school and Sana’s own death at home. Her parents play a larger role here, as we pick up with them in the present in a way that usefully adumbrates actual consequences that represent a fate arguably worse than death. Their presence also suggests that ghosts may not be confined to the dead, whilst also strengthening a thread about friendship that is threaded throughout this film – not to mention guilt and responsibility. The film effectively stands on its own narrative feet without overtly re-treading Sana’s beats. Those aforementioned unsettling moments at which Shimizu excels (reflections here are used very effectively) pepper this film almost as though they were themselves set pieces, or indeed the story itself. This further plays with any firm sense of time in the narrative and develops a marked feeling of the unheimlich. We recognise the generic beats, the references, the style, but not ultimately the specificity of their usage. This same-but-different style here suggests the very mechanics of genre cinema; and whilst one would in no way suggest that there is any precise meta-cinematic imperative here it is nonetheless interesting how Shimizu packages Sana’s narratives as reflections on how cinema works as a medium – one of recorded facsimiles of people, as it were ghosts. It is like Jacques Rivette, like Tsai Ming-liang. There are scenes that explicitly foreground repetition and spectatorship – especially in Sana’s family home, the visitors thereto confronted with scenes playing out as if on a loop.

Ultimately, however, it is Shimizu Takashi and J-horror that return here, seemingly from beyond the grave. If there is a point to the explicit references to Ju-On here it is surely that this director is engaging with earlier hits not really as a means of trying to cynically engineer success so much as establishing a dialogue between two eras and, given the oft-repeated socio-political import of horror cinema, implicitly contrasting their respective engagement therewith. If one can see films like Ju-on: The Grudge (in particular) and these films as contrapuntal lines in a larger cinematic endeavour, then the imperatives that buttress these lines – those that inform Ju-On and those Sana – can better be appreciated and analysed. It also makes for an extended engagement with cinema as a space of ghosts and ghosts as arbiters of cinema. Sana is the ghost not of a flesh and blood character so much as she is of Kayako, the murdered housewife with the grudge; she is the ghost of a ghost. These films, characters, spirits, traumas exist in a vast cinematic hall of mirrors, reflecting each other to the extent that they seem to be in dialogue. Rather than ‘original’ and ‘re-working’ – or a director’s style and sensibility overtaking any substance – this is, at its most interesting, a trip through a glass darkly. From this vantage point it looks back from that other side, which is why reflections are such a prominent motif throughout. Whether this makes Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear any more engaging is open to question, as the title character here remains something of a cypher, her tragedy never really coming into clear focus, but it is worth a look and a thought…or two. And look out for a third film in the series in 2026.