Returning to your childhood hometown as an adult can be stressful – reckoning with their age, the realisation that you've long outgrown your youth, and dreaded reunions with former friends or classmates who never left for bigger pastures. But a little awkwardness here or here is nothing compared to the nightmare laid out by Yûta Shimotsu in his bizarre, unsettling feature debut, Best Wishes to All.
Based on Shimotsu's award-winning short Dreaming to Accept Reality, Best Wishes to All follows an unnamed young nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) returning to the countryside to visit her ageing grandparents. A quaint countryside life of homemade miso and scenic rice paddy strolls soon gives way to something more sinister as her grandparents (an excellently uncanny performance from Masashi Arifuku and Yoshiko Inuyama) display behaviour that cannot simply be brushed off as aged eccentricities – oinking like pigs, massaging their eyeballs and harbouring some strange visitors in the upstairs guest room. What's more, the whole community seems to be unperturbed by a series of increasingly violent, disturbing events, brushing off the protagonist's concern with polite smiles.
On a cursory watch, it may seem that Best Wishes to All opt for surrealism for surrealism's sake, but multiple viewings (which a film as eccentric as this rewards) allow viewers to parse themes not unique to but prominent in modern-day Japan, such as the ever-widening relational gap between the youth and the elderly, collectivism vs individualism, and the ‘backwoods', isolated nature of countryside living that many young people have fled to big cities like Tokyo or Osaka to avoid. The sense of isolation is exacerbated by wide shots of mountains and fields, our young protagonist dwarfed by the majesty of the Japanese inaka, both isolating and liberating.
No matter how hard one tries to hold on to its threads of understanding, Best Wishes to All unravels into confusion and for some viewers, the lack of any sense of certainty will undoubtedly be frustrating. But for others who like to chew on a more perplexing narrative, this ambiguity will make for compelling viewing, as an audience we feel as lost and adrift as our nameless protagonist, searching for meaning in the vague, nihilistic meditations on happiness that accompany each villager's knowing smile.
While plenty of recent Japanese horrors wear the influences of their cinematic ancestors on their sleeves, Best Wishes to All, despite its inaka setting, has a distinctly ‘Western' (for lack of a more summative word) flair to its presentation, feeling in particular directly inspired by modern ‘A24 horror' and Ari Aster's distinct brand of quirky, queasy uncanniness – discordant, screeching violins and all. Conversations are stilted, reactions are inappropriate and shots are held in uncomfortable silence for just a few seconds too long. It all adds up to create an atmosphere that's at once baffling and unbearable, and ultimately leaving us with more questions than answers: who is that man? Why is that door always locked? And… what exactly is in that miso soup?
Overall, Best Wishes to All is a debut that marks Yuta Shimotsu as an exciting new name in the Japanese horror landscape, and one to keep a close eye on.
Best Wishes to All plays at Nippon Connection Festival on May 30 and May 31.
