Best Wishes to All (2022) | What Did I Just Watch?

Japanese horror is its own special brand of horror. Even though we are more than 20 years removed from the explosion of movies that engulfed the horror genre and made the rest of the world aware of Japanese filmmakers’ talent for unique and intriguing horror movies with the likes of Ringu, Pulse, Ichi the Killer, Ju-On, Audition, and many more, there is still something to gain from seeing a relatively new horror movie from Japan. Anyone who has seen a healthy helping of media from Japan, be it anime or live-action, can tell you that the storytelling techniques of the culture can be vastly different from what Western audiences expect. With that in mind, even though I have seen countless anime series and Japanese films, I was still caught off guard by Best Wishes to All.

Pros

Creepy moments and unsettling imagery
Surreal experience keeps you engaged with what is happening
Decent acting from the cast
A laugh-out-loud moment involving a truck accident

Cons

Not enough is really explained by the end
Meandering second and third acts

What is It? (Without Spoilers)

A young girl saw something at her grandparents’ house that seemed scary and strange. Years later, she seems to have forgotten about the incident and is now a young woman studying to become a nurse (Kotone Furukawa). However, she has been asked by her parents to join them at her grandparents’ house for the summer, and she doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about it. Her parents are held up by a few days, so she visits them on her own. They eagerly welcome her into their home, happy to see their little granddaughter all grown up. The grandmother (Yoshiko Inuyama) gets her assistance in preparing dinner for the three of them, mentioning that she’ll demonstrate how to make their special miso paste at some point during the visit. Both of the grandparents appear to sleepwalk sometimes, or make animal noises, but then they seemingly go back to normal after a few seconds of weirdness. In fact, a lot of weird behavior is happening that puts the granddaughter on edge. Then, she makes a discovery that shocks her to her core about her family, her hometown, and what it means for her to continue living.

What Makes it Stand Out?

It will be impossible to do any sort of substantial review of Best Wishes to All without having spoilers involved. Otherwise, the review would simply be: “It was kind of weird.” If you care about spoilers and seeing this movie for yourself without anything being told to you ahead of time, I’d recommend seeing it for yourself, rather than reading on.

Creepy Moments

The first act of Best Wishes to All is the strongest. It’s where the movie is at its most mysterious, which makes all the scenes in which the strange behavior of the grandparents or the noises that the granddaughter hears have the most impact on the tension. The opening scene, when the granddaughter is a child and catches a glimpse of something in the storage room of her grandparents’ house, is really effective because the sound effects and low-lighting give just enough of a silhouette of a scary image to whet your appetite for the horror. When she finally discovers the big thing in her grandparents’ home, it’s shocking, just as it is shocking in how her grandparents react so nonchalantly to it. It creates more mystery and questions—which are, unfortunately, never answered, but we’ll get to that.

The second and third acts, after the granddaughter has had her revelation that her entire family and hometown have some strange things in their homes, tend to drag. That isn’t to say that the movie gets boring or bad, as there are still some good, creepy moments that occur in these acts; some of which are extremely gruesome. The scenes involving the sewing needles, hatchet, and box-cutter are all very effective in their blunt visuals and gory effects. These scenes are also offset by unsettling character behavior that makes each of them feel more surreal and bizarre. They entertained me, but I was also very confused as to what I was supposed to be thinking or feeling in those moments.

Bizarre World-Building

So, I’ve alluded to the things that the family has in their home. What are the “things?” Well, they’re people, but not really, I guess…Essentially, the main character sees a man with his eyes and mouth stitched shut crawling blindly along the floor of her grandparents’ home one day. The grandparents casually drag him back into his room and lock the door, unconcerned about their granddaughter’s dramatic behavior about the whole thing. When the granddaughter attempts to free the man, a container with the miso paste mentioned in the beginning of the movie is next to him where he has a wound on his abdomen, suggesting that the grandparents harvest miso paste from his body, which is more or less confirmed later when the rest of the family is there and complains about the lack of miso after she escapes with him.

Upon escaping, the man behaves erratically, unable to form any words or cohesive thoughts as he stumbles down a narrow road. After he is hit by a car—a moment that I found genuinely hilarious for how ridiculously far he was thrown and bounced upon impact—the person driving the car and the granddaughter’s father, who had just arrived, help burn the body in the field because that’s when you do when one of your “things” dies, apparently. The lack of a miso supply is bad for the family because this will “take away their happiness,” as well as make them go insane. Blood comes out of their eyes, too. So, it’s up to the granddaughter to find a replacement, but she is reluctant to do so out of disbelief and disillusionment over the whole ordeal.

As the story progressed, I was reminded of other horror stories that took place in rural Japanese towns involving curses or supernatural events, like Uzumaki (a.k.a. Spiral) and Higurashi no naku koro ni (a.k.a. When They Cry). I was half expecting things to take a shift into something entirely different. It kept moving along, however, giving more details about how the “things” were so important to the families in the town, and those without them would often fail or die out. Even when the family gets a new one, it’s still never really clear how it’s “made” or what qualities one has to have in order to become a “thing” for a family.

Schizophrenic Symbolism

I’m guessing that there were some messages or allegories in what was going on, but I’m not entirely sure what all of it was. The most I could gather from the details surrounding the “things” is that it was some message about how the wealthy take advantage of people they think are less than them through a rather parasitic method of extracting life out of them. However, I was not really sure what the grandmother’s pregnancy was about. Yes, the grandmother, while clearly very old and likely very past the age of menopause, gets pregnant at some point and gives birth to a baby in a very short gestation period. Not only does she give birth to the baby with the assistance of her family, but her son gets blasted in the face with a bunch of juices in the process; a moment the filmmakers clearly thought was essential to the experience. Moments like this or the hatchet scene in the woods left me scratching my head.

What Are the Drawbacks?

It’s a weird movie, man. In the first act, the weirdness isn’t an issue because we’re just along for the ride at the point, waiting for the movie to make more sense. As it wears on, more questions are raised and fewer answers are provided. I was really enjoying Best Wishes for All up to the halfway point. I thought it had some good pacing, good acting, and interesting cinematography to keep scenes tense and captivating. However, as the movie progressed, I started to get the feeling that the weirdness that was occurring with the grandparents was never going to be explained in a meaningful way. Then the movie got more and more involved with its lore surrounding the “things,” and then events got weirder with the granddaughter’s family. By the third act, I had given up on expecting an explanation for what was happening in this small town. I was still able to enjoy it overall, but I was taken out of the experience because I was less invested in what was happening. Similar to the third act of Men, it’s difficult to make me feel uneasy or involved with the events of the movie if said events are too weird for me to grasp.

TL;DR

What it comes down to in terms of what your overall experience will be watching Best Wishes for All is whether or not you can be satisfied by a movie that creates a world with many questions and few answers. If you’re into bizarre horror movies that have as many surreal moments as bizarre ones, you might enjoy it. If you laugh at slapstick moments in movies that involve people getting hit by something large and flying through the air, this movie has one really enjoyable moment. If you can’t enjoy a movie that doesn’t bother to explain itself, however, you might want to stay away.

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