Sakura is a detective mystery based on a novel. The English title Sakura is a bad choice since countless movies and fictional characters share the same name. The Japanese title Kuchinai Sakura could be translated to Non-rotting Sakura, which has some kind of meaning since it goes against the usual perception of sakura flowers as transient.The first impression was that of a very clean and pristine art style. The colours are mainly white, black, blue, and of course pink from all the sakura flowers. Pictures of the town and the temple look like tourist advertisements for the Aichi prefecture. Though the place names seem to be made up, so it not easy to know where it was filmed. It is beautiful, but too clinically clean, with nothing interesting to fixate on.There are a couple of nice songs too.The main character is an office lady called Moriguchi Izumi who works at the police station. She gets permission to help in a murder investigation and becomes the side-kick of the detective, while having a police boy as a side-kick of her own.Because Izumi does not have the full power of a detective, and has a weak position within the police, her investigation is different from the usual in that she mostly goes around talking with people and snooping around on her free time.But the investigation has a problem of too few clues and that many of the witnesses have little to say or refuse to answer. Because of this, the viewer has too little to think about or use as base for speculation.The setting and intrigues at the police station seem realistic, in contrast to the plot, which is somewhat extraordinary. But it is exactly in those parts that it lacks imagination and becomes the most cliché. Likewise, the motive behind the murders is far-fetched and not firmly based on psychological necessity, making the plot more theoretical than emotional.The actress Sugisaki Hana is great as always and her character has a strong motivation, but the plot sometimes makes her behave in a strategically unsound way that goes against common sense. The police force also acts clumsily once, just so that an action scene could be added. In short, the behaviour of both sides is unconvincing.It's a serious and well-made movie, but doesn't have enough interesting contents to fill up its 2 hours, becoming slow as a result. It does not seem to be recommendable based on the plot or mystery. What makes it watchable is Izumi's dialogues with various people, that get very tense in some cases.