Final Rating: 4.5/5
Sai – disaster is an atmospheric thriller about the creeping dread of everyday life. Incorporating elements of murder mystery, slice-of-life, and horror, Sai tells six stories of ordinary people struck by tragedy shortly after the arrival of a mysterious man (Teruyuki Kagawa) into their lives
Sai presents six stories in something of a blended anthology. The stories are initially largely disconnected, each featuring a different cast of characters going about their day in a different location. Only late into the film is a chronology applied to the stories, as detective Midori (Anne Nakamura) suspects that a series of self-imposed deaths occurring across storylines might actually be the work of a serial killer.
Directors Yutaro Seki and Kentaro Hirase structure Sai as an enticing mystery, deliberate but opaque in their choices. Early into Sai, a math teacher (played by Kagawa) introduces his lecture by stating “When working on a vector problem, the starting point is important.” He continues: “If you choose the wrong starting point, you may not be able to solve the problem.”
This bit of not-so-subtle foreshadowing invites the audience to draw more abstract connections. Each of the main characters have unrelated jobs, are in different locations, and belong to different generations. The most obvious similarity is the presence of the mysterious man (Kagawa), but his characterization between plotlines is so distinct, he’s often hardly recognizable upon introduction.
Sai features a great cast, with Kagawa as the standout. Kagawa essentially plays six separate roles (plus an additional two in the intro and outro), creating six distinct characters each terrifying in different ways. A master barber with a bum leg; an excitable vagrant; a solemn, newly-hired janitor at the police station. The biggest of Kagawa’s roles is as a math teacher at a cram school. As the teacher, Kagawa exudes warmth and understanding as he privately tutors one of his students. The performance is disarming, fomenting trust far past reasonable boundaries. By the time it’s clear he’s crossing a line, it’s also clear he’s been over it for quite some time.
On the surface, Sai appears as a story of a serial killer who reinvents himself repeatedly and stages elaborate suicides. And yet, Seki and Hirase continuously obfuscate the evidence for such an interpretation. No murder is ever shown, no motive is ever given, even the killer’s supposed calling card – a lock of hair cut at an odd angle – is subtle enough to work as a red herring.
In the absence of easy answers, Sai begins to feel more supernatural in nature. Could it be that the mysterious man is not actually a single person, but an avatar of a type of person, or even a reaper of sorts?
Each of the film’s characters is someone suffering immense pressure in their personal and professional lives. Each character is also, in some way, stuck. A schoolgirl in college prep courses is caught in the middle of her parents’ ugly divorce and learns that they will soon cut off funding for cram school. An innkeeper with insurmountable debt turns to drugs and closes himself off from those around him. A shopping mall cleaner begins to reckon with the fact that she’s reached the peak of her career, while her co-workers all refuse to take their jobs seriously.
Regardless of the form he appears in, the mysterious man offers a change. A vision of an alternative path. But this offer comes immediately before tragedy.
In Sai – disaster, Seki, Hirase, and their team have created a viscerally terrifying film. Most unsettling of all is that the horror of Sai is presented as commonplace. The focus on mundanity, the patience of the cinematography, and the refusal to provide clean or exciting solutions result in a film in which the banality of everyday life isn’t just as frightening as the presence of a serial killer, it’s the reason for it.
Sai – disaster was seen during the 2026 Toronto Japanese Film Festival
