Sana

Aside from his Grudge films, its fair to say that for the most part director Takashi Shimizu hasn’t really entered the public consciousness much. I remember enjoying Marebito, a film he shot between the two Grudge films and starring, unusually in a leading role outside his own work, Shinya Tsukamoto. But aside from that his works is a bit of a mystery to me, perhaps because of the J-Horror boom petering out, especially with the end of the Tartan Asia Extreme range (and Tartan in general). 

Yet when offered a screener of two films coming to Arrow Player this October, Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear, well why not give them a go? Or at least the first of the two films, which stars members of the J-Pop supergroup Generations from Exile Tribe (who I confess were a complete unknown to me, but then it’s not my forte). 

At a radio station hosting the lead singer of Generations, a 30-year old tape is found, a submission from back in the day. The woman who found the tape and a member of Generations then disappear and an unnerving ear-worm states to go around members of the band, whose manager brings in a scuzzy ex-police detective to try and find the missing band member but finds more in the past, of Sana, who submitted the tape and wanted to hear everyone’s soul. 

Sana is a complete J-Horror throwback, it feels like a late 90s/early 2000s horror, which you can see as positive or negative as you like. The cassette tape that’s found immediately brings to mind Hideo Nakata’s Ring, but Sana does not for a moment have the clarity of Ring. Much of this sits with the malign presence that starts to spread over members of Generations, their manager and the grizzled private detective. Sana is very much The Malign Presence, and as is the case with such films much of the narrative starts to delve into What Happened In The Past To Sana. Oddly, despite the apparent importance of finding the missing member of Generations, this part of the plot disappears utterly until the end; it’s not that anyone seems to intuit or even vocalise that they need to deal with Sana to find the missing member, the film just sort of forgets it happened to the point where I was asking myself if I hallucinated parts of the start of the film.  

The build-up is reasonably effective but does nothing particularly new and is often a bit stodgy in its staging (much of which is in a single hotel room as if to save on budget). Often we are shown the same scene from various perspectives as the ways in which Sana unveils herself to our protagonists starts to unfold. The shadow behind the curtain; the half-seen form seen from under a desk; the body half-hidden under a vending machine. Often these images are returned to when we see Sana’s past and that’s a nice touch that could have been overlooked. The past and present are syncing together. That said it’s a slow build up and one that could have been much tighter. You suspect the film should have been a breezy 80-minutes at most, but stretched out to an hour and three-quarters to give screen time to our popstars, who are mostly fine. Then again they are hardly stretched by the film, as they are not really asked to do much, although none of them exactly ping off the screen. An early joke that the detective, Gonda, cannot tell them apart and gets their names wrong is perhaps again a neat poke at the popstars expense. And so with the build-up done we get into the nitty-gritty of Sana, and again the film illustrates its relative lack of clarity. We are given conflicting reports of Sana’s behaviour and those that describe her as unnerving are just that: reports with nothing particularly substantiated. The film wants to tell us a lot about Sana as an odd child, but cannot seem to explain why or how. One of the best scenes arguably shows us this – when Sana’s mother wakes up to find her daughter under the duvet with her, beating out a rhythm on her pregnant belly, but there is nothing otherwise that suggests why Sana might be disturbed or how she could have become this malign presence, this pall hanging over Generations. She just is, she just does; if you go back to Ring there’s clarity there to why Sadako is as she is and why she could extend past death back into life;  here Sana is just a convenient presence. The film does try and suggest an obsession with death but again you feel this isn’t really investigated, though it certainly extends into the ending. And oh, the ending. 

I suspect some viewers will take less issue with the ending than I did. I recognise its attempt to bring together past and present and to be shocking but its central action (which I will not describe for obvious spoiler reasons) is so utterly unbelievable, so preposterous in its execution to be one of the laziest pieces of plotting I can recall. What is asked and is enacted by two characters is... just improbable to the point of, well words genuinely fail me. It’s the kind of narrative choice that, if you can forgive it then you’ll be fine, but I was deeply frustrated by it. True, you can view the scene from a different perspective, one of intention and if that is the case it’s very dark indeed, but we have no reason to believe this to be the case in the slightest and would have required a very different build up. 

Yet Shimizu, to his credit, never particularly gets lost in boyband fan service, something I was more than worried I would be subjected to as their music isn’t my thing. Their performances as noted are fine but unchallenging, and it really is Makita Sports as the detective perhaps living out of his car who carries the film. 

So what of Sana in totality? The ending entirely coloured my view of the film, which is a shame as there are effective moments of creeping unease and the film tries not to rely on jump scares (to me the worst and most overused aspect of horror). I suspect those looking for a traditional J-Horror - no blood and some effective shocks - will have a good time, but it’s not likely to gain an audience outside the horror fraternity. It’s a film and a director treading water. 

Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear are streaming on Arrow Player from 27th October. Screener courtesy of Arrow Films.