Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear Review

A mysterious tape ends up in the offices of a radio station, with a catchy melody on it, but that smilingly innocent tune ends up spelling death to those who hear it..

In Sana, one member of a J-pop group, ‘Generations from Exile Tribe’, goes missing after hearing the tune. Their manager and a local detective search for the missing member, only to become victims to the curse too. They all start humming the tune, and see a school girl haunting them, but can they find a way out of the curse before it’s too late?

In its sequel, Sana: Let Me Hear, which takes place a year later, the tune is now affecting high school students, headmistress and a substitute teacher, forcing them to dig up the school’s dark past to try and end this mysterious curse once and for all.

Both J-horror movies come from Takashi Shimizu, best known as the director of Ju-On, a popular J-horror movie franchise that is known as The Grudge in the West. The J-horror classic blew up not long after The Ring became big in both East and West sides of the world in the early 2000s. Admittedly I have not seen Ju-On or The Grudge in years, so this review of Takashi Shimizu’s latest horror films will not be a comparison to his previous work, but judged on their own terms.

If anything, Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear reminded me more of the Ring (which I reviewed a few years ago)  as both have a piece of media (Ring has a tape, Sana has a cassette) that curses anyone who experiences it, and then the victims spend their short time left to live to try escape their fate. However, the curse in Sana works differently, and is in a way more sinister; in Ring you had to actually watch the tape to be affected, however in Sana, you can have Person A listen to the melody on tape, only to start humming it later in front of Person B, who then becomes affected by the same curse, only for Person B to start humming the tune in front of Person C and D, and you get the picture. An ear worm you can’t put your finger on is a lot easier to spread around than a tape (and not just because we’ve moved on from VHS) and therefore it’s harder to contain the curse, or figure out who has been affected in the first place.

As the curse is centred on sound, it’s only fitting that the sound design on both films is excellent; there’s a lot of silence between scares, or just the sound of the humming, to keep the audience on its toes. There’s minimal music, and the score mostly relies on the sound effects that are just close enough to the microphone to make them unnatural and inhuman. From the sound of breathing, to the scratching of one’s neck’s nervously, to the breaking of bones, etc. It’s highly recommended you watch this with good sound equipment, and be prepared to feel claustrophobic if you’re listening via headphones (like I did) as they really pierce through when the tension builds across the films.

The scares themselves are also effective; if you prefer your thrills to be more atmospheric, creepy and tense, then you’ll enjoy the horrors this movie provides. I don’t get scared easily (being married to a scare actor does that to you) but I did really enjoy the technical tricks they use to make each scare unique and work with the clearly limited budget they had. Editing tricks such having three pairs of feet seen underneath a table, but only showing two people above it, or providing different people’s reflections to jump scare the cast and confuse them; they all really worked in selling the atmosphere and horror of the movies.

The films take place one after the other. Sana has the gimmick of real-life J-Pop group, GENERATIONS from EXILE TRIBE, playing fictional versions of themselves stuck in a curse. They play more deuteragonist roles however, as the main character is the Detective who is hired to find the missing member, only to be dragged into the curse himself. Aside from the iffy opening of the movie, which does a poor job of setting up the multiple characters due to its jumping around on the timeline to a disorientating effect, I think Sana is the stronger film of the two. The way the curse unfolds, and the three-day structure across the film to have a time limit to finding the lost member, works to build tension and upping the stakes as more and more members become lost in the curse. The script does a good job in letting each cast member play a part in uncovering a small piece of the puzzle too, like the backstory of how the curse was made, or how they slowly begin to infect each other with the same melody. The movie shines in the second half when little moments, such as the detective clicking his pen, or the manager scratching her neck, actually all serve a purpose in the big reveal for a dark moment towards the film’s climax. It’s clever and I felt rewarded for paying attention to the scenes and characters across the film.

Sana: Let Me Hear however plays the unfortunate trope of going back to the source of the curse and attempting to add more to the backstory, therefore overexplaining certain aspects and in turn losing the horror of the unknown that worked well in the first movie. Once you know the source of what’s making you scared, it can be hard to scare you once again with the same trick, and sadly Sana: Let Me Hear fails to build the same atmosphere that the first movie had. They tried to make this film a touch more gory, which I can understand them doing, but they also play too fast and loose with the curse’s initial rules, making the section where people start going missing less effective. I wouldn’t say the sequel is a total flop however; the film features the acting debut of former NMB48 member Nagisa Shibuya, who I thought did a good job overall. I also liked that some of the side characters from the first film came back to play a bigger part here, and the twist midway through, involving the tape recorder in the car and revealing a thread tied from the plot of this to Sana very well. The ending was also better in this movie, for Sana I wasn’t entirely clear on what the protagonists did to ‘save the day’ as it were, but the finale of Sana: Let Me here was clearer on what broke the curse and the fate of the heroes too (with some new scenes in the credits as well, so watch out for that).

If you’re looking for a J-horror movie for Halloween, but have already watched the classics, I would give Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear a go. It’s clear that Takashi Shimizu loves the genre, and has the talent to still produce scares even to this day. Both movies offer a different enough experience to make them worthwhile watching once, even if you can’t get the earworm out of your mind once the films have stopped playing.

Sana and Sana: Let Me Hear are available on digital and streaming exclusively on ARROW from 27th October. A Blu-ray boxset will be released in 2026.