Two weeks ago, the 2026 Sundance Film Festival came to a close, marking its first edition after founder Robert Redford’s death and the last time it was held in Park City. Next year, the festivities will take place in Boulder, Colorado, the start of a new chapter in its history. For me, it was also a first, as, after years of trying, I finally got press credentials to cover Sundance online – fifth time’s the charm. Sadly, the limited number of days of the online program meant I had little time to post anything during the fest itself. And then came the storms, a weather calamity that’s ravaged Portugal and has left me various days without power and only intermittent wi-fi.
My apologies that it took so long for this coverage to kickstart, but better late than never. And to get things going in style, let’s look at one of the films Nathaniel has already spotlighted in the “We Can’t Wait” series, about his most-anticipated 2026 releases – Ha Chan, Shake Your Booty!…
Loss is an experience common to us all, as close to universal as something can be. Grief is not. Instead, it’s messy and exceedingly personal, an idiom spoken and understood by a single someone, impossible to fully translate as much as one tries to breach those barriers, share the pain to cut it in half. Many artists have explored these ideas in their work, leaning on the idiosyncrasies of mourning to create works that peddle as much sympathy as they risk alienation. In his follow-up to Catch the Fair One, director Josef Kubota Wladyka does just that, to varying degrees of success.
Gone is that past project’s grounded realism, and, in its place, whimsy has blossomed as love language and cinematic grammar, not to mention a way to communicate the sorrow ordinary storytelling struggles to convey. Rinko Kikuchi plays Haru, introduced to us right as the picture starts, cutting a striking figure. She sits in her home, somewhere in Tokyo, head haloed by her curls, eyes painted with bright blue eyeshadow, wearing a velour tracksuit and eating snacks with chopsticks. Without cutting, the camera wanders, reencountering its protagonist when she’s dancing, lazily, until she finds her husband outside.
When their eyes meet, he dances too, shaking his booty as the title suggests. He’s Luis, and this is their idyll, made up of routines we scarcely glimpse but can feel have been set in stone for many a year, all centered on their shared love for ballroom dancing – a homage to the director’s mother, to whom this whole endeavor is dedicated. Like the couple, their film comes alive on the dancefloor, camera drunk with the gaudiness of sequins and swirling feathers, tacky all the way down and full of joy, even as that excitement comes tempered by a touch of anxiety.
The whole thing feels less forced than the quirks of Haru and Luis’ home life, even when Kubota Wladyka leans on stylization, slow-motion, and a world emptied out around the lovers, giving into a magical realism that the following flick will use and abuse. And with this spellbinding connection comes death, as the man suffers a heart attack and Haru’s dream becomes a nightmare. The audiovisual language is very much that of a nightmare, as the insular connection the two had comes crashing down, a fall from heaven.
Such tragedies are prologue to Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, as Haru’s grieving process takes up the majority of the overlong two-hour-plus dramedy. Things start soberly enough, master shots emphasizing distance and the tension between the widow and her in-laws, who beg her to take Luis’ body back to Mexico instead of letting him be mourned according to the Japanese traditions she knows he’d have wanted. The notion of a restless spirit infiltrates the movie, though it’s hard to tell how much of it is the aforementioned magical realism and how much is an attempt to exteriorize Haru’s interiority.
So, there’s a giant raven mascot straight out of Poe, dream dance breaks, past and present colliding in a bisexual three-way hallucination. It’s absurdism played with utmost sincerity, stone-faced serious, which helps the whimsy go down easy, even when it seems forced. QWhatever flights of fancy might possess Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!, they’re all ultimately anchored by the form of a character study. And though the script doesn’t always make sense of Haru’s behavior, Rinko Kikuchi’s performance does. Or, at least, it couches her eccentricity and inexplicable choice in the enigma of a woman who knows who she is and sees no need to explain herself.
At her best, Kikuchi is remarkably abrasive, fearlessly honing on the jagged edges of this character. Sometimes, it almost feels as if the actress is daring the audience to feel alienated by Haru, obstinate in her demanding of patience in contrast to a more expected chase for easy sympathies. And yet, through her, Ha-Chan Shake Your Booty! does earn some sympathy, especially as it circles a particular kind of contemporary loneliness that feels awful specific and easily recognizable at once. Swinging from such melancholy toward the peaks of lunacy elsewhere is maybe the most impressive part of the actress’ gambit.
If the film is tonally unhinged, it’s because that’s the mental state of a woman on the edge, malfunctioning in the hell of her grief, oscillating between a state of emotional paralysis and willful self-destruction. Haru will make you wince and cringe; she’ll leave you wanting to cover your eyes or look away. And against rhyme or reason, Kikuchi makes this mess worth your time. Even the perfunctory places Haru’s journey takes us are somewhat redeemed, made to feel deeper and more complex, by Kikuchi’s performance of someone who needs to let go, who knows she must, but can’t quite bring herself to do so. Not yet.
She’s aided by a solid ensemble cast, which includes the singer turned reality TV star turned Japanese thespian YOU, who some might recognize from her role as a neglectful single mother in Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows. Together with Yoh Yoshida as Haru’s sister, they provide a bittersweet look at middle-aged women balancing their sorrows and desires in modern-day Japan. Part of me wishes the film had followed that path with clearer intention, though one can’t blame the director, his camera, or his characters for gravitating toward Alberto Guerra as Fedir, the object of Haru’s crush. Who wouldn’t want some of that Dancing with the Stars charm and sexiness?
Sadly, the acting isn’t enough to smooth over the roughness on display elsewhere. The script suffers from a myopia that only occasionally works as a portrait of how depression can funnel one’s experience into a pinpoint of emptiness. More often than not, it just isolates the players in a reality that reads as unreal as Haru’s dreams, hollow and disconnected from the world beyond the narrative frame. Then, there are the stylizations that land with a thud, sometimes quite literally – the cartoonish sound effects are a problem. Or the needless structuring of the story into chapters, an affectation too many in a film that’s already bursting at the seams with them.
Grief is messy, and Haru is a mess, alright. There’s value in embracing this, in celebrating it, and boldly telling the world we will not apologize. Even so, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! could do with a little less mess, or a more purposeful articulation of it. If nothing else, Rinko Kikuchi’s performance deserves a better showcase. Or, perchance, a film that’s worth recommending for reasons other than just her work.
Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the worldwide rights for Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! and should release it later this year.