Best Wishes to All
When a young girl visits her grandparents in the country with her family, she is frightened by noises emanating from their attic. Years later, the young nursing student (Kotone Furukawa, "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy") leaves Tokyo before her parents and younger brother to visit them and once again is frightened, this time not only by the thumping from above but the disturbing behavior of her elders in "Best Wishes to All."
Laura's Review: C
Expanding his 2022 short, writer/director Yûta Shimotsu appears to have lost his way, a potent idea about deriving happiness from the misfortune of others garbled along with the logic behind her horror concept. In a convincing turn from Kotone Furukawa, the unnamed lead awakens from a nightmare from her youth, before heading towards the train with her suitcase, stopping to help an old woman along the way. 'I'm sorry that young people are sacrificed for old people like us,' the woman, who looks an awful lot like her grandmother, says, then appears to realize she's spoken out of turn.
When she arrives in the country, she's asked, as she was as a child, if she's happy, a question that comes up so often it becomes odd. She helps her grandmother prepare a meal, delighted with their homemade miso. At dinner she's urged to try the pork provided by a neighbor. Distracted once again by a thump overhead, her grandparents begin snorting like pigs to regain her attention. Later, she'll find one or the other standing gaping in the hallway, as if they've blown a fuse and when she ventures upstairs at night to unlock that extra bedroom grandma claims is used for storage (after 'jokingly' saying 'someone lives there'), her grandmother will appear at the end of the hall, then run forward, repeatedly smashing into the locked door. The next morning at breakfast, she'll witness something horrifying which her grandparents shrug off. 'How did he get out?' says grandma, telling her granddaughter 'our happiness is because of him.'
After calling her parents in a panic (they assure her they are on their way, although do not seem disturbed), the young woman will find some respite with a childhood friend (Kôya Matsudai), a handsome young man who tells her he's taken over the family farm. He doesn't appear too happy himself and while her grandfather has oddly forbidden her to see him, she'll sneak the young man into the house to help her right her grandparents' wrong. When her family arrives, things get progressively worse when she finds out she's been kept in the dark all her life.
But while Shimotsu ups the paranoia level as the conspiracy begins to encompass the entire village, he also muddies his plot, his protagonist literally running for the hills where she hopes to find an aunt who apparently holds her same beliefs. The filmmaker tries to bring virtual reality into his world building and it just doesn't work, nor does the aunt's lifestyle. There are some creepy moments and jarring images in "Best Wishes to All," but the film adds up into a disappointing muddle.
Robin's Review: C
A young woman, on break from university, goes home to visit her grandparents, But, grandma and granddad behave very oddly indeed and the woman soon learns there is a frightening family secret that will affect her, too, in “Best Wishes to All.”
J-horror films (or any horror movies) are not my cup of tea. But, being a guy who loves movies, I will take on about anything. With “Best Wishes to All” I was a bit stretched with the horrific family past that the returning-home student had put out of her childhood memories. It involves an ominous door, very strange behavior by grandma and granddad, a captive man with eyes and mouth sewn shut and the young woman’s father who treats it all as normal with a “Nobody told you?.”
Sophomore helmer and scribe Yuta Shimotsu follows up his 2022 horror Short, “Best Wishes to All” and, description-wise, it sounds the same so I doubt if I will see his earlier film. Here, the horror is more of the creepy than scary kind with grunting grandparents who fall into trances and the young woman only getting ambiguous questions from them like “Are you happy, now?”
No matter what the genre, I prefer straightforward, linear storytelling and “Best Wishes” is not a linear story. But, for horror fans, especially J-horror, there is likely something to see here. But, not for me.
"'Best Wishes to All" will begin streaming on Shudder on 6/13/25.
