{"id":48130,"date":"2025-06-12T13:57:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=48130"},"modified":"2025-06-12T13:57:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:57:06","slug":"best-wishes-to-all-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/12\/best-wishes-to-all-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Wishes to All [2025]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A young woman visits her grandparents and uncovers a dark family secret in Yuta Shimotsu\u2019s Best Wishes to All, streaming on Shudder on June 13th.<\/span><\/p>\n

What secrets are your family keeping from you? How do you react when you find out? These are the questions that drive a young nursing student as she is let in on a hidden portion of her family\u2019s history and current situation. Yuta Shimotsu\u2019s film, expanded from a 2022 short of the same name, co-written with Rumi Kakuta, explores the horror of the home and happiness with a beautiful banality.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Best Wishes to All has an interesting, low-key energy to the whole affair. The oddly blas\u00e9 reaction and presentation is a choice. It fits the story, what it says, and how it all plays out. People act extremely odd with a disconcerting calmness. The purposeful detachment, once it\u2019s determined to be the method, sets an interesting aura. The combination of weird body horror in a dulled lighting and color palette, and an occasionally grainy film texture, creates an uncomfortable feeling. Even the student, played wonderfully by Koto Furakawa, is lit in a way that makes her separate from her surroundings, which is a great choice to highlight the out-of-sync of the character with everyone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0When she visits her grandparents\u2019 distant village, reconnecting with a youth friend upon arrival, it\u2019s immediately apparent her grandparents are acting strangely. They make esoteric references, ignore noises around the house, and mismatch their reactions to the questions asked. One wonders if their sundowning, and if this will be the drive of the plot, putting her in danger of increasingly unhinged grandparents.\u00a0 It\u2019s not.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m reticent to truly reveal the impetus of the action, as I dislike a review going into the details. But as it is twenty minutes into the picture and the results of the reveal drive the hows and whys of everyone\u2019s actions, I\u2019ll say this: have you read Ursula K. Leguin\u2019s magnificent short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas? Best Wishes to All comes like an expansion of the short story, focused on a family and what you\u2019ll do to find happiness.<\/span><\/p>\n

It raises questions. Can you do a bad action for good? Can you be truly happy with a darkness hidden underneath? Especially if the youth\u2019s methods and wants differ from the previous generations. Who is right? Can a \u201cwrong\u201d action that leads to good truly be a bad thing?\u00a0 Where is the line of calling out your family or letting it go? Will letting it happen be corrupting?\u00a0 While many aspects may strike home for Japanese viewers more than Americans (in Japan, whole villages are being abandoned as the youths have moved away and the elderly die), there is a universality of the generational divide, of rot that continues across the years, and the expectations that flow both ways. And as we see in the world over, what is the human cost of success and happiness? The damning of the capitalist system by way of the metaphor of the horror film.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These are questions asked in our lives, and Simotsu chooses to approach this and the direct horror of the family\u2019s situation in a banal, disconnected manner. The family themselves are unnamed (thus my references to \u201cYoung Nursing Student\u201d instead of direct statements), honing the \u201cthis is us all\u201d approach. It\u2019s shocking, yes, but also carries an uncomfortable truth, and the matter of telling, via the muted colors, dulled expression, and \u201cthis is life\u201d attitude, settles into a discerning rhythm.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The matter-of-fact, dulled feeling juxtaposes against the veering into the wild nature of how those questions are explored. Again, I appreciate the practicality of the presentation, the bizarre treated as realist. But I also was left wanting more, wishing the film took that next step to the wild for both interest to the viewer and to dig into these concepts. Many will be left hanging because we\u2019ve seen similar, done more extreme. It\u2019s not because it\u2019s not extreme cinema, but it dips its toes into the extreme pool. Best Wishes to All feels like a Takashi Miike light.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even with the holding back from similarly toned films, uncomfortable body horror is ever present, there will be wincing and \u201cWTF?\u201ding. Across the film, there are some great moments: mutilations, plenty of blood, fire, and more.\u00a0 A visit with an aunt is a standout sequence. A primer on the sub-genre, perhaps. \u201cIf you can handle Best Wishes to All, try out Audition.\u201d But it may sit into the valley of \u201cnot extreme enough for some fans, too extreme for the next.\u201d But that\u2019s subjective to the viewer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Directed by Yuta Shimotsu, Best Wishes to All is a unique, uncomfortable fable of the modern age, raising questions to explore within the film and for the viewer. It has a low-key, realist energy directly in opposition to the bizarre, extremist nature of the action and plot, building a strange journey, all led by a great performance by Kotone Furakawa.<\/span><\/p>\n

Best Wishes to All premieres on Shudder on June 13th.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A young woman visits her grandparents and uncovers a dark family secret in Yuta Shimotsu\u2019s Best Wishes to All, streaming on Shudder on June 13th.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[477],"class_list":["post-48130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48133,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48130\/revisions\/48133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}