BEST WISHES TO ALL - Mark Reviews Movies

Best Wishes to All, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 12, 2025

The central metaphor of Best Wishes to All, a feature adaptation of director Yûta Shimotsu's own short, isn't a terrible one. The execution of it within a story that's meant to serve as a kind of horror-based fable, however, results in far too many questions to justify how simplistic and on-the-nose that main idea actually is.

Without giving too much away too early, the basic notion of Kakuta Rumi's screenplay is that happiness is a limited resource in the world. Everyone, then, is scrambling to find, obtain, and hold on to it, and if that means eliminating the possibility and opportunity that someone else could be happy, that's a worthwhile sacrifice in the minds of some folks.

All things considered, the world surely seems to operate in this way when it comes to wealth and the planet's actual, tangible resources, so the very first question to put forth about this movie is a plain one. Why do the filmmakers even bother with a metaphor when reality offers plenty of far more believable examples of the point it's trying to make? Shimotsu's movie becomes so bogged down in the confusing mechanics and intrinsic ridiculousness of its premise that the movie's straightforward message is overshadowed by its own absurdity.

Thankfully, the movie is a bit more than just its strange gimmick. It's also an odd and occasionally eerie horror movie, and Shimotsu shows he surely has more interest in creating that disquieting atmosphere and balancing it with a twistedly amusing tone than in trying to help that core idea make a bit of sense. On a surface level, at least, there are some worthy elements to this shallow movie.

The plot revolves around an unnamed—like everyone in the story—nursing student (played by Kotone Furukawa) who's leaving Tokyo to visit family out in the country. It's supposed to be a getaway for her entire family, but because someone has developed a fever, that leaves the soon-to-be nurse to spend time alone with her grandfather (played by Masashi Arifuku) and grandmother (played by Yohiko Inuyama). Things are quiet and pleasant at first, as they were during a prologue showing the granddaughter visiting at a younger age, but soon enough, events become louder and more disturbing.

The granddaughter's first clue that something is amiss is a banging noise coming from upstairs in the house, which wouldn't be strange, except that such a thing happened when she was a kid and the grandparents are now very cagey about answering her when she asks what the sound is. First, grandpa starts oinking like pig, leading his wife to follow suit—pointing out that the pork they're eating at the moment came from a pig that would have been happy to give up its life and body for them. One of the grandparents jokes that the noise is actually because someone is living in an upstairs room, or at least, that's how the granddaughter takes the throwaway comment.

When someone does suddenly appear in the house behind the grandparents, though, she realizes it wasn't a joke. The man is crawling on the ground with his eyes and mouth sewn shut, and grandpa and grandma start dragging him back to his room.

This is only the start of the story, which has the granddaughter and a childhood friend (played by Koya Mastudai), who has recently taken over his family farm and given up on dreams of becoming a painter out of financial necessity, grappling with what to do about the man. For the nurse-in-training, there's no other option but to save the poor guy, but the grandparents and other people—far more than one might anticipate—have other notions.

This is also and unfortunately the end of the movie's key idea, in which some people are fortunate, cruel, or both enough to imprison the less-fortunate—both financially and, it seems, emotionally—and steal whatever happiness they did, could, or would have in their lives. Again, the logistics of how this process works are confused and confusing, mainly because the entire concept exists solely in the realm of metaphor.

In an isolated story, that approach might have worked, but Kakuta's screenplay keeps expanding its scope and the circle of those who know about this practice. Soon enough, it seems as if this demented, parasitical tradition is an open secret in the family, the area, and, perhaps, the entire country or even beyond. Once it leaves the confines of the house, the idea become impractical to the point farce, which Shimotsu does at least acknowledge by way of some gory gags and the apathetic nature of every character apart from our two conscientious objectors. Even that humor, however, becomes of the one-note variety.

Even so, Best Wishes to All takes its main concept seriously, and that's the wrong approach to an idea so slim, so carelessly considered, and so broadly presented. It leaves us with too many practical questions for a movie with such an impractical metaphor guiding it.

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