BEST WISHES TO ALL (aka BEST REGARDS FOR ALL, MINA NI KO ARE, 2022)

New streaming on Shudder!
Directed/Written by Yuta Shimotsu
Check out the trailer here!!

Upon arriving at her grandparents’ home in the country, a young unnamed nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) notices something is off. Her grandparents are acting strangely—freezing in place, speaking in riddles, being unnaturally chipper, and then there’s the guy bound to a mattress in the attic. Before going to her grandparents. the young girl’s view of life seemed to be optimistic and hopeful but the longer she stays with them, the more she realizes that this happiness is a by-product of something surreal and terrifying.

BEST WISHES TO ALL is about looking behind the curtain of well the well to do and successful and seeing what skeletons they have in their closet to achieve this happiness. Much is done with the disconnect our nameless lead has with her grandparents who seem to have changed greatly since she used to see them when she was a child. Director Yuta Shimotsu has taken the short film this film is based on and filled it with moments of the uncanny, when normal looking things cause an unnatural effect that manages to terrify the viewer, at least, that’s what happened to me. There’s something about older people that have always skeeved me out and Shimotsu knows how to amp up that uncomfortable feeling to the max.

While I understand the allegory Shimotsu is playing with for the most part, things get pretty nuts by the end of BEST WISHES TO ALL. I’m not sure I understand all of the stuff regarding the family and a birth that occurs, but up until that last act, I was following along nicely, marveling at the clever way BEST WISHES TO ALL communicates this pessimistic message that no one is without sin, at least no one who has achieved anything in life. Surreal moments like when the lead’s brother starts bleeding form the eyes are viscerally uncomfortable to see, but it’s nothing compared to what happens with the grandparents in the last act.

Kotone Furukawa is fascinating as the lead. She is a nurse, so she is compelled to help and believes her grandparents are in turmoil. But as sweet as Furukawa is, she is far from naïve. In fact, when she realizes what is going on, she fights her hardest to do what she believes is good, making her a character worth rooting for—even though this seems to be a situation a positive outlook simply can’t beat.

I left BEST WISHES TO ALL intrigued, a bit confused, and eager to share this oddball little horror gem from Japan with others. In a dog-eat-dog world where you have to cut a few corners and dot a few eyeballs in order to get ahead, BEST WISHES TO ALL rings truer than ever, despite how batshit crazy it is. Dive into the surreal world of BEST WISHES TO ALL, it’s a relevant, sometimes touching, and sometimes nauseating look at the twisted world we unfortunately live in.