Best Wishes to All

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Yûta Shimotsu has seen a few Takashi Miike films. Everyone should. He’s one of the world’s greatest and most prolific genre filmmakers, so that’s not a drag on the Best Wishes to All (also known as Best Regards to All) writer/director.

His first feature follows a nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) visiting her grandparents over break. They’ve gotten odd. Or have they always been odd and she’s just blocked it out more effectively until now?

Shimotsu’s film, co-written with Rumi Katuka and based on his own 2022 short, is a nimble little beast. What begins as a reckoning with the horrors of aging twists into something else altogether. And then, something else. Because what the unnamed granddaughter learns is that her family is keeping a secret from her. But what’s even more disturbing than the secret itself is the nonchalance with which it’s held, and that the secret does not belong to her family alone.

The filmmaker mines unease, even queasy dread, surrounding obligation to an older generation, the notion of one day turning into that same monstrous burden, or even worse, the realization that you never were anything other than a monster yourself.

Stylistically, Best Wishes to All recalls some of Miike’s more absurd horrors, Gozu in particular. But Shimotsu stitches the absurdity of Gozu or The Happiness of the Katakuris or even Ichi the Killer to pieces of grittier horror. Not quite Audition, but in that zip code. But he can’t strike a tone that can carry the two extremes.

The grotesquerie is always in service of a tale that’s more folk horror than body horror. This doesn’t always work, but it’s never less than interesting.

Kurukawa is delightfully absorbing as the obedient granddaughter utterly gobsmacked by her grandparents’ behavior. What appears to townsfolk as naiveté actually mirrors the audience’s horrified confusion, making the poor girl all the more empathetic.

But what is it, exactly, that’s expected of her? And why? Best Wishes to All is frustratingly unclear in terms of the narrative’s underlying mythology. This limits the satisfaction of the climax and robs the film’s final image of its necessary impact.

It’s a weird one, though, and certainly entertaining. Shimotsu can’t quite pull it all off, but it’s fun even as it falls apart.