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‘Best Wishes to All’ Review: J-Horror Debut Finds a Creepy Underside to Social Contracts
Shudder is debuting Yuta Shimotsu’s disquieting, surreal first feature — where a young woman discovers the secret of happiness is terrifying.
The thinly veiled commentary on aspects of modern Japanese society may fly over offshore viewers’ heads streaming on Shudder, but genre fans will appreciate the bizarre story’s sinister, twisty progress. They urge her to avoid a local farmer (Koya Matsudai) she knew as a child, and who also seems to exist outside this tacit social pact, whether by personal choice or deliberate exclusion. Nonetheless, the director pulls off this conceit by seldom straying from a stubbornly non-hyperbolic execution, in which events that might’ve been played in a key of high melodrama instead unfurl in stealthy, methodical fashion.
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