Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! Review | Rinko Kikuchi Steals Hearts In Uneven Cross-cultural Tragicomedy

Haru (Rinko Kikuchi), the resplendent heroine of Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! has a fairytale life. She’s been happily married to Luis (Alejandro Edda) for decades. Even now, their relationship has the popping flavour and fervour of love’s early sweet rush. Mornings in their house easily yaw off into impromptu dance sessions. Cultural differences—she being Japanese and he Mexican—have only spiced the attraction. However, life doesn’t lack in merciless surprises. In the middle of a competition, Luis, who’s also her regular dance partner, drops dead. Premiering at Sundance, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s spritzy, life-affirming Tokyo-set film mixes dourness with a light touch. While not always successfully fluid, Kikuchi’s winning, perfectly judged turn lets you stay the course.

The shock and grief over Luis’ sudden death sends Haru plummeting. She stakes her wish of cremating her husband as per her tradition. Luis’ father seeks to honour a burial according to Mexican customs. Haru stays cooped up by herself, turns down social invites, wholly rocked as if her own life has ended. Never having seen herself as individual and separate to her husband, she’s strapped in a limbo, at sea how to process and move on. It also doesn’t help that she has these visions and dreams of Luis, returning encased in a giant crow. These surreal flourishes initially interrupt, but gradually grow organic to her journey of bereavement and release. Blunt as the metaphor is, it’s the more pronounced indulgence in a film flitting between the emotional and fantastical. Upon her friends’ insistence, Haru joins a dance class and is instantly smitten with the teacher, Fedir (a swoon-worthy Alberto Guerra).

At times, the screenplay, which Wladyka co-wrote with Nicholas Huynh, grates in repetitiveness—a sort of indecision and vagueness as to how to move the story forward. The spark that kicks a narrative into motion threatens to be snuffed out as the film exasperatingly defuses into the same old battle of jealousies. Haru’s dilemma could have been more engaging if Fedir was written smarter than a stereotype. Instead, he’s the typical hot Latino instructor in an open marriage, who charms the pants off everyone. Haru is initially scandalised, taken aback at her cloistering guilt in being magnetised by Fedir. She struggles to dismiss the infatuation, feeling strictly beholden to Luis’ memory. Anxiously, she checks her emotions. When her friend flags Fedir being in an open marriage, she has to google what it even means.

Through it all, Luis’ crow-ghost lurks unbidden. Haru keeps scanning the room with bated breath. Is she betraying him and the years of their complete devotion? Ironically, though, it also nudges her to be more outrageous and provocative and desperate. Her responses become misdirected, a journey of recovery blindsided by a silly crush. It functions as the portal to her accepting Luis is gone. Chafing at this will just make her anguish drawn-out. But he has to spiritually enable her passage, ease her conscience, reassure her.

Despite some fluctuating, frustrating beats in the writing, the endlessly charming Kikuchi never lets our attention or empathy blot out. It’s a fizzy turn from the actress who can sway effortlessly as well as relay fraught unspoken negotiations in a single wordless exchange. Haru’s conflicts and soaring desires find ravishing harmony in Daniel Satinoff’s whirling camera movements. She’s aided by sweeping sequences, like one where a scuffle on the street magically segues into a dance set to “Be My Baby”. It’s so sublime, you might forgive the wobblier sections and choices such as futile chapter divisions.

Kikuchi’s gaze holds such yearning and ache that it bulwarks the entire film. Even as Wladyka seems to confuse his footing in latter stretches, Kikuchi grounds it with pure, sensational charisma and buoyancy. You never lose sight of Haru’s grief that wells behind her little fling. Wladyka gifts Kikuchi the latitude to be utterly expansive, sentimental, rash and joyously unbound. But you never laugh at her. Kikuchi revels in the dazzling, foot-tapping choreography, the music, crafting someone who has more fortitude than she initially thinks. Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! puts its epicentre on a woman rediscovering her inner strength. Haru realises she can liberate herself and barrel towards a future not sanded over by self-reproach and shame. It’s a glorious trip, warranted in spite soft spots.

Debanjan Dhar is covering the 2026 Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.