At first it looks like just another manga putting Sadako in a silly setting trying to cash in her new movie. But it is really faithfull with the idea behind the caracter, and doesn't try to make Sadako cute or funny to the reader, instead explore how would this horrific monster affect a melancholic post-apocalyptic world.

Which is good, because Sadako is already appealing being Sadako. Many mangas try to make her be an waifu or a cute girl or wathever, but she doesn't need to be a cute girl to have appeal she is already Sadako, one of the most famous and scary ghosts ever imagined.

The premise is: After two little girls watch Sadako's tape in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, just because it was the only tape still working, Sadako comes out of a TV just to see that the world has ended while she was away not cursing anyone. The girls have never seen anyone else besides themselves in this wasteland were most humans have already died, and don't want Sadako to leave, and Sadako promisses to follow them for seven days, on the promise that the three of them will search for any surviving humans they can find. What Sadako don't tell the girls is that on the seventh day, she will kill them, because they watched the tape and are cursed.

Instead of making Sadako a clumsy ghost or an awkward villain, or trying to make her the misunderstood hero, they made her interact with a world so devastated by death and the lack of hope, and with so little to live for, that a figure of death like her, is actually welcomed, as a figure of peace and the promisse of resting of the terrors of the end. And Sadako seeks the same peace, longing to cease her existance in this plane along with the last human, and earning her eternal rest.

Sadako is humanized, we can see her ability to feel, and to form connections with other humans, and to face her trauma and her cursed existance, while still being consistent with all her portrayals on movies, and by never letting her be a hero or a good person, just a person. A dead traumatized scary person.

The final scene is a little cheap. But her final moments with the girl she followed for a week is truly powerfull, and enphasizes how the girl was innocent, but not stupid. She loved Sadako, because she hadn't anything else to love, but she also could sense how scary she was, and how much pain and grudge she bore. And how her story wasn't going to have a happy ending.

I truly wish this was the real movie, and not something made to promote it. No cheap cash-in spin-off to promote the 7th entry in a franchise that already lost it's appeal has the right to be this good. It the best Sadako portrayal I've seen since the first movie, and it's a shame that the one author who still knows what to do with the character isn't involved in her canon stories.

If hey ever do an 8th movie, I hope Natsumi Koma comes back to write another Sadako story to go along with the movie.