In a film landscape oversaturated with jump scares and haunted house clichés, Best Wishes to All, the debut feature by Japanese director Yûta Shimotsu, creeps up like a nightmare you didn’t know you had. It doesn’t scream in your face — it whispers something sinister behind a curtain of rural tranquility. Shimotsu, expanding on his 2022 short film, has crafted a quietly devastating horror parable that’s less about monsters under your bed and more about the monsters inside your morality.
Set against the peaceful Japanese countryside, the film is deceptively beautiful, like a pastoral painting hiding a rotten canvas beneath. Shimotsu makes no effort to dilute the film’s despairing tone. Instead, he sharpens it, using a subdued aesthetic and a measured pace to explore the disturbing premise at the heart of the story: the idea that our personal happiness, societal peace, and economic stability might depend on the quiet suffering of others.
It’s horror in concept more than in execution, though the execution still packs some effective punches. The film starts with a nursing student, played with calm empathy by Kotone Furukawa, who leaves Tokyo to visit her grandparents in the countryside. There’s an unspoken sadness in her optimism. She believes in helping others. She’s chosen a career in caregiving because she wants to do good. She’s not naive—she knows the world can be cruel—but she’s trying her best to be a light in the dark.
That light starts to flicker the moment she reaches her grandparents’ quaint village home. Things feel just a little off. Her grandparents (played by veteran actors Inuyama Yoshiko and Arifuku Masashi) greet her warmly, and their home feels cozy. But soon, small cracks appear in the facade. Dinner conversations take a turn for the strange when the grandparents begin to oink like pigs mid-meal—loud, animalistic snorts with no explanation. Later, her grandfather freezes, mouth open wide in silent horror, eyes locked on the ceiling like he’s communing with a ghost. These moments don’t escalate in the traditional horror sense, but they gnaw at you. The discomfort isn’t explosive—it festers.
Furukawa’s character, used to the eccentricities of aging relatives, brushes it all off. They’re just old, maybe a little senile. And in between the weirdness, they’re still warm, still loving, still asking her if she’s happy with her life. That question, repeated subtly throughout the film, becomes the thematic center of the story. “Are you happy?” begins to feel less like a casual question and more like a threat.
The slow-burn unease explodes when she discovers the truth: her grandparents have been torturing a man in the upstairs room of their house. He’s tied up, hidden away, and his suffering is no accident. It’s part of a tradition, a family practice even. And it gets worse — the rest of her family shows up, and they’re completely unfazed by this revelation. Her father, with casual indifference, mutters something like, “Maybe we should have told her sooner.” No guilt. No fear. Just the weary acknowledgment of someone who’s accepted something monstrous as a matter of course.
And what’s the reason for this cruelty? It’s not revenge. Not sadism. Not madness. It’s happiness. Their own happiness — and by extension, the happiness of the whole town — requires the suffering of one unlucky soul. It’s a system. A tradition. A cosmic tax. One person’s misery fuels the contentment of others. No one questions it anymore. And those who did? They’ve either left or assimilated.
The rules of this horrifying setup are never fully explained, and that’s precisely what makes it more chilling. The vagueness gives it universality. It’s not some ancient curse or mystical spell. It’s a metaphor — and a damn effective one — for how our societies often operate. Behind every convenience, behind every privilege, there’s usually someone paying a price. Someone working a sweatshop job. Someone being silenced. Someone being used. In Shimotsu’s world, that moral transaction isn’t hidden. It’s in the attic.
What elevates the film beyond simple allegory is the way it captures the emotional toll of realizing that you’ve benefited from such a system. Furukawa’s character doesn’t become a hero overnight. She doesn’t go vigilante or burn the house down. She grapples. She hesitates. She’s torn between her values and her family, between her ideals and the horrifying reality of her origins.
And then comes the twist: this isn’t just her family. It’s the entire village. Everyone has their own version of the “room.” They’ve all made the same devil’s bargain. Everyone’s smiling. Everyone’s polite. And everyone’s got skeletons — literal or metaphorical — hidden somewhere close.
This discovery reframes every calm scene we’ve seen until now. The gentle old neighbors. The kids playing in the streets. The steaming bowls of miso soup. All of it is part of a system that runs on exploitation. It’s one thing to suggest that suffering exists in the shadows of society. It’s another to argue that it’s a requirement, a structural necessity. Shimotsu doesn’t just ask whether we’re complicit—he asks whether complicity is the only way to survive.
There’s one character who seems to reject this moral code: a classmate of Furukawa’s, played by Koya Matsudai. He’s the only unhappy person she meets, and for good reason — he hasn’t bought into the system. That makes him an outlier. An anomaly. Possibly the next victim. His presence becomes a mirror for the protagonist’s own crisis of conscience.
As the film progresses, it becomes less about horror and more about philosophical reckoning. Shimotsu doesn’t hand us a neat resolution. Instead, he paints a grim picture of modern life, where choosing not to exploit others means isolating yourself, becoming the outsider. That’s the real horror here — not the bloody implications of the grandparents’ attic rituals, but the idea that true kindness and moral integrity might be fundamentally incompatible with happiness in a broken world.
Visually, Shimotsu keeps things tight and minimal. The house is clean, warm, lived-in. Nothing feels haunted, but everything feels wrong. And that’s what makes it work. Horror isn’t in the setting — it’s in what we now know lies just out of sight. The best genre films make you rethink what you’re seeing in real time. And once the truth of the town is revealed, every pleasant landscape starts to feel like a lie.
Critically, the film doesn’t land every punch. Some of the disturbing set pieces veer into the absurd. A sequence where the grandmother starts pounding on a door in the dark, for instance, feels more like a clumsy improv scene than a chilling moment. It’s a rare misstep in an otherwise tightly controlled piece. But it’s forgivable because the emotional and thematic core of the film remains so compelling.
Katie Rife, introducing the film at the Chicago Critics Film Festival, pointed out how Shimotsu belongs to a new wave of Japanese horror directors shaped by the creepy-kid, techno-paranoia era of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Directors like Ryota Kondo and producers like Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) left their mark on this new generation, and you can feel their fingerprints all over Best Wishes to All. But Shimotsu isn’t copying — he’s evolving. The fears that haunted VHS tapes and cell phones in the J-horror heyday have morphed into something broader. Shimotsu’s terror isn’t technological — it’s systemic.
This is horror for the era of late-stage capitalism, climate crisis, and burnout. It’s a movie that says, “You’re not just living in a broken world — you’re benefiting from it.” That’s a heavy message, but Shimotsu delivers it with a slow, sinister grace.
And at the core of it all is Furukawa’s performance. She’s the soul of the film — quiet, observant, and heartbreakingly human. Her journey isn’t about becoming a hero. It’s about wrestling with a system she never asked to be a part of, a family she once trusted, and a world that rewards cruelty with comfort.
In the final scenes, Shimotsu lets the film settle into something like despair. The hope that the protagonist might rise above it all, might change the system, is revealed to be more complicated than we’d like. Kindness, we’re told, is a phase. Something you grow out of. Like baby teeth. The tragedy is not just in what the characters do, but in what they come to believe they have no choice but to do.
Best Wishes to All ends not with a scream, but with a quiet resignation. And that might be the scariest thing of all. The idea that horror isn’t some masked man with a knife—it’s the daily choice to ignore suffering in exchange for peace. It’s the comfort of a well-set table while someone screams upstairs.
The title, then, becomes bitterly ironic. “Best Wishes to All” is not a warm sentiment. It’s a curse. A challenge. A dare. Shimotsu is telling us: if you want to dream of a better world, you’ll have to fight like hell for it—and give up some of your own comfort along the way. Best wishes, indeed.
