The paranoid suspicion that everyone else is in on some big secret they’ve excluded you from gets full play in “Best Wishes To All.” This debut feature from Yuta Shimotsu, which expands on his 2022 short of the same name, is a macabre allegory more redolent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and Yorgos Lanthimos’ early features than familiar J-horror tropes — even though Takashi Shimizu of the “Grudge” series is a producer here. The thinly veiled commentary on aspects of modern Japanese society may fly over offshore viewers’ heads streaming on Shudder, but genre fans will appreciate the bizarre story’s sinister, twisty progress.
A prologue shows a little girl visiting her grandparents, who ask with odd pointedness, “Are you happy?” That night, with her own parents fast asleep, the child is awakened by a noise upstairs. She goes to investigate — while we’re unclear what she sees, it’s enough to keep giving her nightmares years later. By then, our heroine (Kotone Furukawa) is a nursing student in Tokyo. When minor illness prevents other family members from going along, she must travel to the grandfolks’ alone, a prospect that makes her uneasy for reasons she can’t quite peg.
At first glance, the elder couple (Arifuku Masashi, Inuyama Yoshiko) present a stereotypically doting, harmless front. But they sometimes break abruptly into animalistic or catatonic behavior that their guest can only interpret as shared expressions of senile dementia. That assumption is upset by more inexplicable noises upstairs, and the realization that there is indeed another resident — a captive, really. While his constrained, severely distressed presence horrifies our heroine, the seniors shrug, “Our happiness is all because of him.”
Indeed, it seems there is an essential principle to life here that our protagonist has been spared of; her naivete becomes a source of increasing laughter and disdain for others. They urge her to avoid a local farmer (Koya Matsudai) she knew as a child, and who also seems to exist outside this tacit social pact, whether by personal choice or deliberate exclusion. When these two young adults attempt to foil an apparent kidnapping situation, the rather grotesque truth they’ve been denying all along is pressed upon them in no uncertain terms.
Without revealing more of what the script carefully unfolds, suffice it to say Shimotsu presents this seemingly ordinary, wholesome community as operating in the belief that happiness is a limited resource. And like most such resources, it’s hoarded by some at the cost of others’ misery. Presented in matter-of-fact, if sometimes grisly terms, this arrangement isn’t explained in terms of the occult; it’s just the way things are. As the narrative grows more alarming and darkly comedic, an implicit critique becomes rather explicit, skewering societal pressures towards conformity, success and outward appearance. There’s also built-in commentary on Japan’s particular modern dilemma of an aging population and low birth rate.
The metaphor for any First World nation’s hypocrisies is perhaps ultimately not all that fascinating or original. And sometimes there’s a sense of over-calculation in the way “Best Wishes” seeks to shock us with surreal elements breaking the polite surface of everyday life, like a nasty internal eruption. The actors — playing characters who are pointedly never given names — maintain an admirable deadpan, but occasionally we’re too aware that they’re being used as devices for ideas with scant psychological grounding.
Nonetheless, the director pulls off this conceit by seldom straying from a stubbornly non-hyperbolic execution, in which events that might’ve been played in a key of high melodrama instead unfurl in stealthy, methodical fashion. As editor, Shimotsu sticks to an unhurried pace that belies the considerable story arc that gets packed into a tight runtime. There’s a cool concision to Ryuto Iwabuchi’s cinematography, too, the sole design element betraying rising panic being Yuma Koda’s string-based original score.
Then of course there’s Furukawa’s performance, in which an uncomplicated ingenue figure discovers all her idealism rests on a lie — not only that, but everyone considers her something of an idiot for not having figured that out sooner. Like a more sympathetic version of the protagonist in 1973’s original “The Wicker Man,” she finds herself fully isolated as a person — not in on a joke that gets told at her expense. As the scales drop from her eyes, exposing a reality uglier than she’d imagined, this modestly scaled film makes up in sheer queasiness whatever it lacks in major scares or spectacle.
