“Only the pursuit of happiness is guaranteed. The rest is up to you.”
– David Fagan
While there are things that are specific to culture, community, or time, other things are universal, like the overwhelming dread experienced by the young when the unknown occurs in the dark. Suddenly, even if in an acquainted place, with the shadows rising around them and noises emanating from the corners, the warm embrace of day is replaced by the cold terror of the unfamiliar. Core memories, institutional emotions, are borne from moments like these, lurking within us even when we reach adulthood. Screening during The Overlook Film Festival 2025 is writer/director Yûta Shimotsu’s feature-film debut, the haunting tale of confrontation Best Wishes to All (みなに幸あれ), a slow burn of a horror thriller whose thematic claws dig in so slowly and deeply that one doesn’t realize they’ve been hooked.
Once, as a little girl visiting her grandparents, she (Kotone Furukawa) thought she heard a noise and found a disturbing entity scuttling around a room. Whether real or part of her adolescent imagination, it’s nestled in her mind even as a young adult. But when a scheduled family visit to see her grandparents turns into a solo trip when her parents are delayed due to her younger brother falling ill, she seizes the opportunity to confirm whether her experience as a child was real. But what she discovers will not only chill her to the bone, it will change all their lives forever.
A still from BEST WISHES TO ALL. Photo courtesy of KADOKAWA.
Adapted from Shimotsu’s prior short film of the same title, to describe Best Wishes to All through similar tales would, in essence, destroy the experience. Rather, it’s best to consider this as a cousin to films like Evil Does Not Exist (2023), drawing on similar existential dread, with dashes of House’s (1977) absurdity, culminating in near-Koko-di Koko-da (2019) levels of symbolism. This gives you a taste of things without spoiling the experience and, even then, you may walk away with more questions than answers thanks to Shimotsu’s enigmatic approach. What this means is that you cannot look away from Best Wishes, not even once, not even address a single distraction, because everything you see, everything you hear, connects straight back to the core message of the film, which is entirely interpretive. Is the film about generational differences? Yes. Is the film about societal responsibilities? Yes. Is it directly tied to the cultural view of collective happiness over the individual? Yes. Is it about how the ways in which we view the world shift and grow as we move through childhood to pubescence and into adulthood? Yes. It’s also entirely possible that it’s only about one or two (maybe none) of these things and Shimotsu just wants to weird out their audience via a social dark comedy in the vein of Jūzō Itami’s The Funeral (1984).
What can be confirmed is that Ryuto Iwabuchi’s (Welcome Back) cinematography balances the unease of familiar spaces within a difference context against the casualness of the performers despite the circumstances. What does this mean? In the initial sequence wherein we meet our lead as a young girl, the hallway of the grandparents’ home is a warm chestnut brown, narrow, and surrounded by shadow. As the young girl, once nestled between her parents, walks the hall in search of the source of the sound that stirred her from sleep, the house, previously comfortable and safe due to the prior sequence of a shared meal and laughter, is now stripped of all of it as the girl moves closer to a room at the end of the hallway, the door slightly ajar. Night has a way of reshaping the familiar unto its filled with our internally-created dread. In my own youth, I hated sleeping at my grandparents’ home because, despite my easy wanderings during the day, everything turned nefarious and strange under the light of the moon. This is what grounds Shimotsu’s film — the ordinary masks something extraordinary and dangerous, waiting to be discovered. What that thing is and what it means, frankly, could be applied in a number of different directions. The cinematography’s ability to create unease extends beyond the nocturnal spaces of the family home and into the rest of the narrative’s world. It’s not made, of course, through some kind of trickery, but by maintaining the illusion of normalcy that the film began with. This is where the reference to Evil Does Not Exist comes in as the whole of that film maintained a lovely and striking look regardless of the narrative terms, unlike House which twisted and shifted to make room for the more surreal elements. Where Best Wishes goes, the lack of change in the look and style of the film cements the disquiet, heightening the stress and strain that the lead character undergoes because the world doesn’t reflect the new circumstances that she must wrestle with. Nothing is crazy nor absurd, it just is and that’s enough to drive anyone mad.
Kotone Furukawa in BEST WISHES TO ALL. Photo courtesy of KADOKAWA.
Of course, the unease isn’t just emanating from the cinematography. It’s also coming from the script, written by Rumi Kakuta (Sana) and based on Shimotsu’s original short. There’s a strange cordiality that runs throughout, even as it’s laced with incongruous behavior. Characters are at the height of politeness regardless of their true feelings and intentions, unless, of course, something overtakes them and they begin to oink like a pig, move as though directed by someone else, or any number of other unexplainable (or unexplained) behaviors. The geniality makes sense up to a point wherein the relationships of grandchild and grandparents would function within a set of social rules until everyone settles in as characters relax, except the rules are constantly maintained, thereby created a sensation of separation between our lead and everyone else. It’s as though, instead of coming to visit family, she’s an estranged visitor trying to reconnect with her roots. That the characters never really speak each other’s names aids the sensation of distance between them, regardless of familial bond. It’s in this way that the real core element of the story reveals itself: the question of happiness and how one achieves it. Through the screenplay, this concept is interrogated, investigated, and manipulated, characters speaking as calmly in regard to passing the fried chicken as to mention some bloody tragedy. With the screaming relegated solely to actor Furukawa, unrest in the narrative (and through the audience) arises from the matter-of-fact delivery of intention and rules that propagate the tale, a mystery only partially explained to us and yet somehow fully understood by the characters.
The horror, if one could be so bold to describe it this way, can be inferred a number of different ways, which is both a boon and a hindrance. The script relies so much on the empty spaces to fill gaps that when the film gets super weird, meaning appears absent in the act, leaving only confusion in its wake. Though one can interpret how they like, between the focus on politeness, the questions of happiness, and the matter of age-related perspective, one can easily take away an interpretation in which Shimotsu and Kauta are railing against the notion of happiness as it relates to modern society. Specifically, that one is unable to achieve happiness without causing harm to someone else. The horror comes in the navigation of the notion and whether or not the characters accept or reject it by the end of the film. Frankly, in the world we exist within, not in a Simulation Theory way, but a real, physical way, it does often seem like the only ones happy are causing undue pain to others. What does it mean to live in a society like that? What does it mean to accept that this is all society is? These are hard questions and Best Wishes gets so close to a clear answer, until it decides to lean back on obfuscation instead. Mystery only goes so far in a story, the uncertainly creating lingering nodes that poke and provoke audiences well after the story is concluded. To a great degree, Best Wishes succeeds, but one has to be willing to navigate the uncertainty to get there.
Screened during The Overlook Film Festival 2025.
Available on Shudder June 13th, 2025.
Final Score: 3.5 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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