Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! review
By Joel Humphries · Watched 09.26.26
★★★ 3 / 5
Spoiler-free review
A trilingual swirl of grief, romance-adjacent longing, and dance, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! folds in magical realism with polish: it looks great, is confidently directed, and features strong performances as a Japanese widow struggles to reclaim movement after loss. I’m usually a soft touch for this kind of reality-bending, but the two-hour runtime feels padded by grief without enough character movement to justify the length. The script’s slow progression never becomes compelling, even as dance resurfaces as healing. I get why it’s winning praise, but I didn’t connect; unless this premise is your sweet spot, I’d pass.
Full review — contains spoilers
Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! has a premise that should be right up my alley: an international, multilingual story about grief, romance and dance, with some magical realism mixed in. I’m a sucker for magical realism. But despite all the ingredients being there, this one never quite connected with me.
The movie is about a Japanese woman dealing with the death of her husband. She and her husband live in Tokyo. She's Japanese, he's Mexican, and their relationship is multilingual—they speak Japanese, Spanish and English with each other. The movie does the same thing, moving naturally between all three languages.
They're also dancers. Dance is a huge part of their relationship and a huge part of her identity. After her husband dies, she basically can't dance anymore.
So most of the movie is about grief and her very slow attempt to find her way back to dancing and back to something resembling a normal life. Eventually she develops a relationship with her dance instructor, but I wouldn't really call this a romance. It's much more about grief.
There's also magical realism throughout the movie, which normally is something I'm a sucker for. There are moments when you aren't entirely sure what's real, what's memory and what's happening inside her head. I should have loved this more than I did.
It looks great. It's well directed. The performances are good. There's nothing technically wrong with it, and it's gotten a lot of praise. I just didn't connect with it.
Part of the problem is that it's about two hours long and I didn't feel like there was enough movement in the characters to justify that length. You spend a very long time watching this woman grieve. Eventually she starts coming out of it and dance becomes part of that process, but I didn't think the script did enough to make that progression compelling. So this is another one where I understand why other people like it more than I do.
It's not that the movie is too sad. That's not my issue. Something about the story and the energy just didn't work for me. Maybe I'm simply not the audience for this one. Unless this sounds very specifically like your kind of movie, I probably wouldn't recommend it.