Review: ‘Best Wishes to All’ questions the state of happiness

“Are you happy?” This query becomes the film’s central quest for truth. In Yûta Shimotsu’s Best Wishes to All, humanity hitches its happiness to others. If one family is happy, that means another drowns in sorrow. The moral code to extract joy lays the foundation for a pleasurable existence. Shimotsu supposes that not everyone is built for a happy life. The writer/director wraps an essential message about life and the pursuit of happiness through spooky horror storytelling, like body disorientation and bleeding eyes. It’s not scary in the traditional sense, but a great dread and unease coats the screen as a young woman contends with her family’s upsetting beliefs.

Kotone Furukawa plays a young woman who comes home from university. She’s the quiet and reserved type; she loves her family and remains forever dedicated to nursing school. She cares deeply about other people, positioning her as the ultimate empath. While staying with her grandparents, she learns a dark, unsettling truth about their way of life that rattles her to the core. She couldn’t have predicted such a grim circumstance, but it speaks as much to her life as it does her relatives. Once her parents arrive in town, it becomes clear she’s the outlier of the bunch – that such brutality has been going on right under her nose without her ever realizing it. As her grandparents share, one’s happiness has to come from somewhere. It’s a delicate balance – happiness vs unhappiness – in the universe, with energies shifting from one person to the next. And disturbing that balance can create absolute chaos of insurmountable proportions.

Shimotsu mounts plenty of world-building while also keeping many bigger questions under wraps. There’s a mystery and flood of unanswered questions still eerily present in the finale. Sometimes, you just have to leave the audience hanging and let them fill in the blanks with their imaginations. Shimotsu keeps the scares to a minimum, opting for mood and atmosphere rather than in-your-face frights. There’s a visual flair he wields to give Best Wishes to All a style of its own, yanking open the curtain from time to time to share a glimpse into the real horror hiding behind closed doors.

Best Wishes to All, a title which feels very much like a passive-aggressive “good luck” as the world crumbles around the characters, hinges entirely on what Furukawa’s character chooses to do with the darkness unfolding around her. Should she continue the family’s sick and twisted tradition in staying happy? Or does she blow the entire thing up? The film presents various moral dilemmas about caring for others and what it means to be a good person. It might be light on actual scares, but its profound thesis about finding happiness speaks directly to this present moment. It’s stunningly relevant in a day and age when maddening cruelty is the norm and true happiness seems to be something of the past.