FILM REVIEW: Best Wishes To All (2023)
- Gav
- Jun 13
- 3 min read
Best Wishes To All - New Release Review
Director: Yûta Shimotsu
Starring: Kotone Furukawa, Kôya Matsudai, Masashi Arifuku, Yoshiko Inuyama
Written by: Rumi Kakuta, Yûta Shimotsu
Produced by: Takashi Shimizu
Cinematography by: Ryuto Iwabuchi
Synopsis:
A young woman visits her grandparents on a break from university. While she's there, she discovers a dark secret about them and potentially herself.
Thoughts:
Growing old is never fun and as we age we tend to discover things about life, our family and ourselves that never haunted us as kids because we...just didn't know. Yûta Shimotsu's debut feature film, based on his previous short, is one of the most disturbing films you'll watch all year.
Kotone Furukawa stars as an unamed nursing student who travels from Tokyo, where she lives now, to the village where she grew up to visit her grandparents. What starts off as a sweet reunion after all these years slowly turns into a nightmare when she begins to see her grandparents behaving in a disturbing manner. Oinking like pigs and freezing in the hallway like statues are just a few of the strange occurrences that worry her.
And then she discovers something even worse and she begins to question her own sanity and her whole life.
Having been Produced by Takashi Shimizu, the Director of 'Ju-on: The Grudge', you know that you're in for some atmospheric storytelling and although 'Best Wishes To All' doesn't have any jump scares, it's still pretty terrifying filmmaking. There's a real sense early on when we see our leading lady as a kid exploring her grandparents house that this film is gonna fuck with your mind.
Kotone Furukawa really sells the innocence of her character when she first arrives and as her grandparents "weirdness" gradually becomes more apparent. And then when she needs to sell the absolute disbelief and disgust at the depravity of what she is witnessing, she delivers in spades.
There's some tender moments as she meets up with an old acquaintance and they sort of reconnect but the entire time I was just waiting for that inevitable, big reveal. It's good but I'm not sure it quite hits the mark and I think it might be down to the script and how the reveal is actually handled. The explanation is very original and it taps into themes about capitalism, social behavior, fake realities, choice vs inevitability and more than anything, communal happiness. But there's a stretch of scenes after a huge reveal that is difficult to watch because of how it is written and how the characters react.
It's lovely to look at and definitely reminded me of Japanese horror classics from the 90s and early 2000s. Shades of Takashi Miike's 'Audition' is evident. The brown hallways of the house, shadowy and secretive, create an ominous space for dread to invite itself in. It's full of unsettling scenes that aren't particularly bloody or gory but felt just as grotesque. The grandparents are wonderful to watch with their eerie smiles and occasional vacant, zombie-like expressions. Creepy and uncanny. And the build up is incredibly tense but when her parents arrive and everything is revealed, it sort of loses that tension and feels like a different film. Not bad, just different.
'Best Wishes To All' is an intelligent, thought provoking film that takes the pursuit of happiness to the next level. Deeply disturbing but it just sort of falls away towards the end.
Verdict: ⭐️⭐️⭐️½
-Gavin Logan
'Best Wishes To All' is available to stream on Shudder from June 13th
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