Movie Review: ‘Best Wishes To All’ Will Have Your Stomach In Knots

Director: Yûta Shimotsu
Writers: Rumi Kakuta, Yûta Shimotsu
Stars: Masashi Arifuku, Kotone Furukawa, Yoshiko Inuyama

Synopsis: A young woman navigates a discovery within her immediate family only to find much more.

Happiness for everyone looks, and feels different. For me it’s a quiet night at home with my cats, for others it’s a good book, or even their careers. It’s a basic human emotion, and when it’s missing from your life, the consequences are often dire. How does one quantify the price of the sacrifices that must take place to obtain happiness? And how do we justify happiness in a world filled with cruelty? Best Wishes to All attempts to answer these questions while making sure you’ll never want to sleep over at your grandparents house again. It’s uncomfortably isolating with its small village atmosphere that has paranoia lurking behind every closed door.

Grandparents’ homes are a place many people attribute nostalgic feelings of happiness; I often think back to the many holidays spent around a large table enjoying countless meals. As an adult, looking back at those memories has me daydreaming about the lives of my grandparents and what they sacrificed for me to allow me the success in life I have. In Best Wishes to All, we are introduced to a young nursing student (Kotone Furukawa), who remains unnamed for the entirety of the film. She’s on her way to her grandparents’ house while on a short break at school. Planning on meeting her parents and younger brother there, she ends up at her destination a few days earlier. From the moment she arrives, something about her grandparents’ home feels off; she’s not new to this feeling, as a child she’d often hear noises coming from the ceiling above her as she attempted to fall asleep.

Curious to find a reason for the strange noises coming from behind a locked bedroom door, the young woman begins to notice her grandparents are not acting the way they normally would. Both unassuming from the outside, her grandparents are eager to share with her a secret, each time showcasing stranger behavior, like standing in the middle of a hallway, mouth agape, staring at a locked door. Or eating a delicious meal with their granddaughter and coming over the table to both grab her fingers and suck on them. It’s safe to say she is disturbed, and tries to find answers for her grandparents’ sudden shift in personality. But what turns out to be a getaway trip to a once dear place quickly becomes dark while discovering the secret to happiness.

Best Wishes to All breaks the sense of normality in this young woman’s life by creating increasingly disturbing situations for her to encounter. As she navigates through the film, the answers to her questions don’t render any real solutions she can decipher, throwing her deeper and deeper into confusion even after the remainder of her family arrives for their visit. Director Yuta Shimotsu makes sure to not only keep the audience on their toes, but his lead character as well. Choosing to let us discover the evil truths and the cost of her and her family’s happiness alongside her, Shimotsu drives home the differing ideals between young and old and how the willingness to make irreversible sacrifices in the name of happiness comes easier for some than others.

There’s a lot going on within Best Wishes to All, and for those who aren’t used to Japanese horror it could become overwhelming. There’s plenty of disturbing imagery within this film, and it comes in different forms. The big reveal of the film, which is best left without spoiling, is a shock in concept alone. Paired with plenty of bleeding eye sockets and axes to the head the, visuals add an extra layer of ick. Making the main character feel like the odd one out from the start makes her easy to root for, even when she makes a decision that is hard to accept. The film tends to get lost in the more over the top ideas, leaving some of the most compelling conversations the film is trying to invoke to the side. Making it seem that the dark truth behind her family’s happiness is something she needs to accept, giving her no real choice for herself in the end.

Taking place in a close-knit community adds yet another layer to the film’s bleakness and the paranoia felt by the film’s lead. Captured through the lens of cinematographer Ryuto Iwabuchi, the focus on architecture makes the film feel like it takes place in two different realities: the home of her grandparents and the life she lives as a nursing student. Newer buildings in Tokyo capture the film’s youthfulness and progressive innovations, paired with the older, more broken-in homes of the aging neighborhood she grew up in. Iwabuchi’s work blends these two worlds together for her, giving her reminders of her family’s sacrifices even when they physically aren’t there.

Leading a film filled with some truly stomach-turning plots and visuals cannot be easy, but Furukawa surely makes it look that way. She has a unique ability to match the film’s increasingly bizarre atmosphere through the way she smiles. Earlier in the film, her smile is natural and lights up a film that has a bleak color palette. As she finds more and more darkness within her family life, the corners of her smile become sharper, and the giggles behind her smiles sound forced, making her look like she’s in pain rather than exuding real joy. She plays a bright-eyed nurse who only wants to help others like a natural; even when the film gets overstuffed with ideas, she shines as the film’s relentless lead.

Moreover, Best Wishes to All is a solid thriller that shocks with its plot and will have your stomach in knots from its visuals. Even when there’s one too many things going on at once, the film gives unconventional answers to life’s most existential questions about the costs of happiness. Shimotsu crafts an impressive film that leaves a lasting impact long after the credits roll.

Grade: B