New England Premiere

With his feature debut, Yûta Shimotsu’s Best Wishes to All crafts an eerie, slow-creeping nightmare that blends folk and body horror, existential dread, and an acerbic critique of Japan’s rigid societal expectations. Imagine The Visit and When Evil Lurks filtered through the stark, uncanny lens of Kiyoshi Kurosawa by way of Yorgos Lanthimos—this is horror where the terror isn’t just in what’s happening, but in the sheer matter-of-factness of it all.

The setup is deceptively simple: Kotone Furukawa (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy) plays a young woman who returns to her grandparents’ rural home after years in the city, a reluctant visit overshadowed by a vague unease she can’t quite name. At first, everything seems normal enough—too normal, even. The house is tidy, the smiles are warm, the meals are generously portioned. But something is off. A locked door at the end of the hallway. Strange noises at night. The way her grandparents watch her just a little too closely, their pleasantries stretched over something rotten underneath.

It’s here that Best Wishes to All reveals itself as something far darker than a simple psychological horror. Shimotsu peels back the layers with a deliberate, unflinching patience, leading us straight into the heart of a deeply ingrained sickness—one that is both horrifyingly literal and steeped in generations of quiet, complicit suffering. Tapping into Japan’s rapidly aging population crisis and the social weight of traditional family structures, these real-world anxieties are twisted into something grotesque and visceral. Happiness, after all, is relative. And in this house, it comes at a cost.

Furukawa delivers a performance that is as restrained as it is devastating, grounding the film’s surreal horror in raw, human emotion. As her character spirals deeper into the suffocating nightmare of her family’s legacy, full-blown body horror supplants creeping dread, deploying practical effects that feel sickeningly organic.

Underneath its eerie precision and skin-crawling unease, Best Wishes to All poses a quietly horrifying question: if happiness is a finite resource, what happens when we run out? Shimotsu doesn’t just ask—he forces us to sit with the answer, long after we’ve left the theater.

– Nicole McControversy

Brattle Passes not accepted.