Best Wishes to All
Her final exams pending, a nursing student travels from Tokyo to visit her grandparents in rural Japan, a return to the fields and customs of family and deference, of meals together and home-made miso and nostalgic memories of happiness and safety and a dark hallway where years before she once saw something strange which she knows must have been the wandering imagination of a half-asleep child.
Her grandparents elderly, their minds beginning to drift, she suspects they may be in the early stages of dementia, her grandmother particularly distant, contradicting herself when asked about the noises heard from the unused upstairs bedroom, first saying someone lives there then that it was a joke, something out of character for her, all the time telling her that their only concern is that she be happy.
Expanded by director Yûta Shimotsu from his 2022 short of the same name with the help of co-writer Rumi Kakuta, Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ, Mina ni sachi are) stars Kotone Furukawa as the visitor who returns home to find things unchanged but begins to see the strangeness of the life she left behind, her family keeping a secret which has maintained their position and prosperity but for which there is a cost paid by others and failure to conform has consequences.
The premise similar to that of the 2001 Spanish thriller Intacto, where luck is a commodity which can be traded or siphoned off from an individual, in Best Wishes to All it is happiness which is stolen, the grandparents – unnamed, as are all the characters in the film – living a simple life but one in which they are content in all things, draining their good fortune from the man they hold hostage, his eyes and lips sewn shut.
The frog in the water which grows hotter around her, old enough to be outraged and ask questions but conditioned to be obedient and respectful, her “noble cause” to help others, the slippery slope of what society views as acceptable and what crosses a line is unclear; eating pork over dinner, grandma calls her naïve when she becomes upset when they mockingly snort and grunt: “the pigs are saying how happy they are to be eaten.”
Bizarre and occasionally disturbing though also abstract and overly meandering, Best Wishes to All is a conscious misnomer, a rolling nightmare in a world of ones and zeroes where everything must balance and there will always be a winner and a loser and one person cannot change the way of the whole world, fighting against something which is going to happen anyway to the detriment of one’s family a selfish act, for is it not better to be on the upside than the downside?
Best Wishes to All will be available on Shudder from Friday 13th June
