Many short films are made as pitches for a potential feature film, and as such they tease an interesting concept while lacking the time to actually explore it in any detail. Working with co-writer Rumi Kakuta, director Yûta Shimotsu makes his feature debut, Best Wishes to All, by expanding his earlier short of the same name. While the feature length version develops the theme of the short, it never fully digs into what exactly it is it's trying to address. Viewers may be left frustrated by a rushed final act, but for fans of extreme Japanese horror, Shimotsu's debut is a must-see.
The initial setup seems like a Japanese riff on M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit. An unnamed student nurse (none of the characters here are named), played by rising star Kotone Furukawa, is set to visit her grandparents with the rest of her family when she learns that she will have to spend the first few days alone with the old pair. Furukawa is anxious about doing so, and we understand why when she arrives at her grandparents' home. The old dears seem to be suffering from senility, exhibiting increasingly odd behaviour that ranges from oinking like pigs at the dinner table to trying to force their granddaughter to poke their eyes out after referring to her as "the apple of their eyes."
Furukawa is also disturbed by a locked door upstairs, one which brings back some dark childhood memories hinted at in a prologue. She hears bumps around the house, but her grandparents deny hearing any such thing. Maybe they've gone deaf, or maybe they're hiding something?
I'm not going to spoil it for you, but Best Wishes to All features one of the most striking end of first act twists I've seen in horror in some time. At this point the film enters peak Takashi Miike territory, with some deeply disturbing imagery on display. But it's also blackly comic, as there's something undeniably amusing about a cute old Japanese couple being involved in such monstrous behaviour.
Best Wishes to All becomes a classic tale of a young person discovering the dark secret of the adults in their town, in the vein of Invaders from Mars and Society. There's always something effectively unsettling about the people you look up to, whom you have relied on for protection in your youth, suddenly becoming unrecognisably evil in your eyes. Shimotsu gives this concept a fresh take by using it to examine how older generations gaslight their children and grandchildren into accepting evil as a necessary way of life. The ideals of youth - be it opposing genocide or wishing to tackle climate change - are dismissed as youthful naivete, something the kids will grow out of. And the sad truth is that at a certain point we all have to make peace with ignoring the suffering of others so we can live a semi-comfortable life. The images of violence in Best Wishes to All are shocking, but no more shocking than those we quickly scroll past on social media so we can sleep at night while. Like so many young people, Furukawa's character can't understand how her elders can be so casual about the atrocities they commit, but she quickly discovers that she's part of a cycle of cruel indifference that she can't escape if she wishes to carry on living.
Just as Shimotsu starts to dig into this fascinating look at the generation gap, he gets distracted with some more twists that only serve to distract from the central theme. We're left scratching our heads at what some of the final act's deeply weird developments might mean, and the film could use another 15 minutes or so to get its ideas across more cogently. One idea that's explicitly clear from Best Wishes to All is that of how we're forced to make peace with the fact that we're all monsters feeding off the less fortunate. That unsettling thought will linger long after the film's gruesome imagery has faded.
Best Wishes to All is on Shudder
Directed by: Yûta Shimotsu
Starring: Kotone Furukawa, Masashi Arifuku, Yoshiko Inuyama, Koya Matsudai
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