In dance, you have to lead with confidence. Your partner looks to you for guidance, and they require you to look back at them responsively, to move instinctually without faltering. There’s need for surefootedness, consistency, and impeccable timing. Luckily for us, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fun and deceptively frothy third feature Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! has all of these qualities in spades.
The titular Ha-chan (a sequined, septum-pierced, and afro-permed Rinko Kikuchi) has her partner Luis’ (Alejandro Edda) hand in marriage and in dance. The cross-cultural couple is perfectly matched, mesmerizing in motion on Tokyo’s ballroom floors. Cinematographer Daniel Satinoff’s camera sweeps in and out with slo-mo and speed-up to capture them as they trace tightly across the terrain, lost in their own little world. It’s enough to lift you off your feet, and in Luis’ case it does––only for him to come crashing down to earth and off this mortal coil.
It’s Pixar levels of an emotionally efficient intro. Following Luis’ accident, Haru is found newly bereaved, returned to the dining table that they once shared food and YouTube videos over, now unlit and alone. Luis’ Mexican family has differing ideas about what should be done with his body. Outnumbered, Haru retreats into her grief without an outlet. She doesn’t attend her own 46th birthday party. It’s a fresh chapter in her life––indeed, the film is broken up by Tarantino-like title cards that lend it a graphic novel flair––but she isn’t ready to view it as such. Her friends, Hiromi and Yuki (sparky variety show star YOU and gentle-faced Yoh Yoshida) encourage her to get back to dancing. After all, a new instructor has arrived in town, and he’s hot!
Fedir (Alberto Guerra) is indeed hot in the most photogenic sense—the camera darts from his eyes to his body much like the trio’s. It’s here that Wladyka’s film begins to step into its own. Every romcom trope is hit, but the gaze here is unapologetically––sometimes even aggressively––female. Ha-chan is messy, as she has every right and reason to be. She’s dealing with grief, to say nothing of the differing expectations of opposite-sex courtship across cultures. Fedir is also married, and non-monogamous. On paper, some of these elements may sound exasperatingly Sundance, but in practice they add up to character writing that is not only thoroughly modern, but refreshingly honest.
A born romantic lead, Kikuchi is magnetic––a self-possessed performance that reads as emotionally whole, startlingly present, and alive. Wladyka clearly adores her. The filmmaker made Ha-chan with his own Japanese mother in mind, and as such he allows Kikuchi to lead and his film to follow. It’s her reactions to her interpersonal tangos that are consistently centered within them. A film that gives the floor to a Japanese woman’s sexuality like this––so uncompromisingly and empathically––feels nothing short of revelatory. Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! loves its protagonist unconditionally, and it encourages the spectator to feel the same.
But what of Luis? Haru’s grief and guilt creeps in whenever she returns home, their vinyl record collection lining the walls of a placed packed with shared memories. He’s still there in spirit—quite literally, in fact. Luis watches over Ha-chan as she stumbles through her next steps, appearing to her in the form of a costumed chibi mascot resembling a crow. It’s a twee quirk that raises alarm bells at first sight––a little too Everything Everywhere All at Once, perhaps––but it feels a lot more Apichatpong Weerasethakul once it clicks. Luis’ new visage fits with Ha-chan’s inner world precisely because it doesn’t. Unlike her angular and adult new flame, he’s cuddly and comforting, like a plush toy. As a crow, he represents death, but death needn’t appear scary and threatening when the deceased is someone you love. He doesn’t fit within her routine––he barely fits through the house’s doorways. Ha-chan must learn to let go.
Beyond Ha-chan’s front door, Wladyka’s love letter extends to the history of dance on screen and the self-reflexive power of performance. In ethos, his film nods to Masayuki Suo’s classic Shall We Dance?––the studio space that acted as a site of self-discovery for Koji Yakusho’s salaryman here becomes a therapeutic space of self-rediscovery for Ha-chan. A delightful play-within-the-film sequence, in which Dirty Dancing is reimagined as a Japanese-stage musical, echoes the metatextual pleasures of earlier Ryusuke Hamaguchi works. A station boardwalk brawl in which the first punch is born out of racist aggression unfurls into a charming Broadway dance number à la La La Land.
A true crowdpleaser, this is a film in love with its artistic inspirations and what we see in them––with the way we look at each other and ourselves when our hearts ignite and we feel our feet start to move on their own again. Shimmering and sparkling, Ha-chan carries the rarest maturity about sex, love, grief, and allowing yourself to take life one step at a time.
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.