Rinko Kikuchi returns to the screen September 25, when Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! opens in theaters following its award-winning debut at Sundance last winter.

The offbeat dramedy stars Kikuchi as Haru, a middle-aged woman competing in Tokyo's Latin ballroom scene alongside her husband. The partnership ends in catastrophe: he dies of a heart attack mid-competition. What follows, as Dance Magazine reports, is Haru's path back to dance — and to herself — through an infatuation with a new instructor.

The film is not a conventional dance picture. Rather than staging competition numbers as straightforward realism, it channels Haru's emotional arc through imaginative, fantastical dance sequences. Miri Murano and Chikako Takemoto choreographed the work.

Kikuchi's casting gives the project weight. The actor, an Academy Award nominee for Babel, has built a career on physically expressive roles, and Haru demands both technical ballroom work and the looser, dreamlike movement the fantasy sequences require.

The premise inverts familiar dance-film formulas. Instead of a young prodigy rising through rankings, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! centers a middle-aged widow rebuilding an identity in a scene that just witnessed her loss. The Latin ballroom setting — competitive, performative, built on partnership — becomes the arena where Haru processes both grief and desire, with the new instructor serving as catalyst.

The Sundance recognition last winter positioned the film as a festival standout before it secured its theatrical date. Its September 25 release will test whether a genre-bending dance dramedy, anchored by a Japanese star and a pair of choreographers working across reality and fantasy, can find the broader audience festival jurors already rewarded.

For choreography watchers, Murano and Takemoto's sequences — which collapse the boundary between Haru's inner life and the competition floor — are the film's central draw.