Sana is a schoolgirl who dreams about sharing her music with the world. Those dreams, however, are cut short when she’s accidentally killed by her parents, strangled by the cord of the tape-deck forever hung around her neck. Decades later, the cassette from that tape-deck resurfaces, and anybody who hears the song recorded on it can’t get the melody out of their head. They soon realise that Sana’s song has a darker purpose, and they need to solve the twisted mystery behind it before it consumes them entirely.
This is the plot of Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear, a two-part tale from Ju-On: The Grudge director Takashi Shimizu, with the first chapter following a J-pop band (the parallels with Smile 2 are notable), and the second a class in Sana’s school, alongside the parents and teachers previously tormented by the schoolgirl and her cassette.
While both instalments offer a slightly different aesthetic — the former borders on supernatural teen slasher, while the latter oozes a grotesquely tender melancholy — Shimizu employs a variety of techniques to thread his narrative together.
The first is the way in which generational storylines and realities entwine, creating an intentional disorientation that accentuates the cyclical, hereditary nature of grief and evil, reminiscent of Stephen King’s It (the 1986 novel), or György Pálfi’s Taxidermia. Scenes and memories (predominantly the traumatic) replay and overlap as they are experienced from alternative perspectives and timelines, stressing the recurrent, purgatorial limbo of our haunted protagonists.
His second method is the superb use of sound, where Sana’s song is tapped, hummed, scratched and even clicked (with a ballpoint pen clicker) by the cast, creating a constant, implicit rhythm which worms into the subconscious, transforming sound into an unseen physical entity (much like Sana herself) that plagues the audience as much as the characters.
This results in truly chilling moments. And there’s no denying that Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear offer everything one could wish for in a J-horror picture, particularly the use of tech and media as a symbol of disconnection for the living and passage for the dead — think VHS in Ring, mobile phones in One Missed Call, and computers in Pulse. Yet it feels as if Shimizu is in cruise-control, ticking the boxes of what his audience expects, instead of showing us something truly new and shocking.
Despite this — and despite the fact that when viewing both volumes of Sana back-to-back, the director’s tendency to replay scenes can often feel like tedious repetition, rather than a potent thematic device — this is still crucial viewing for Shimizu savants. Not every movie, after all, can break new ground in its genre, even with an icon behind the camera.
DISTRIBUTOR
Arrow
DIRECTOR
Takashi Shimizu
SCREENPLAY
Takashi Shimizu
Rumi Kakuta
DIGITAL
27 October 2025
