Best Regards to All

Let's say you wake up one day and the reality you thought you had known wasn't exactly reflective of the present state of things. That's this movie. You follow a young woman to her grandparents home where, well, things aren't what they appear to be. Despite outward appearances the truth reveals, layer by layer.

What transpires is almost like a Twilight Zone episode set in a smallish village of present day Japan. It's a bit of a rabbit hole. There are comedic moments, there are graphic moments of fire, others of blood, and all the while there's a curious protagonist soaking it all in, just trying to make it all make sense. It's a bit of a rambler.

Honestly ... This is such a simplistic and naive concept in the first place its unbelievable that they have strung it out to be a 90 ( boring and silly ) feature ... It is apparently based on an earlier short, but having sat through this I won't be seeking that one out ... The acting is fine, but the staging is just over confident and immature ... It is all in focus, but visually bland ... The relationships are not well thought out ... Alienation and justification of inaction seem to be the themes, but there are much better ways to communicate these themes than this ... Perhaps the director thinks its a surreal take on these ideas ... It isn't.

Although online news describe this film as the winner of the Japanese Horror Film Grand Prize, it's not your typical thrilling horror flick. Instead, it retains director Takashi Shimizu's signature absurd horror style. The movie features many baffling segments, but I personally enjoyed it. It carries a vibe reminiscent of the Japanese TV series "Tales of Terror from Tokyo and All Over Japan", weaving malice into everyday behaviors.

The director uses an exaggerated approach to depict aspects of life that "seem slightly off but are hard to pinpoint." When a group of people-or even an entire society-are characterized by self-centered psychopathy, empathy, guilt, and remorse become obsolete. By the end of the film, even the female protagonist succumbs to this transformation.

This film reminds me of the "Steamed bread made by human blood (other people's blood)" described by writer Lu-Xun in his story "Medicine": At a marketplace, a soldier displays a young man's public execution by decapitation. As the blade falls and the head rolls, ignorant onlookers exchange coins with the soldier to dip their buns into the warm, fresh blood, believing it will cure their children's ailments.

Heading to her grandparents' house, a woman tries to use the experience to get closer to her grandparents, only for her to notice their eccentric and offbeat behavior is indicative of the rest of the village, who expect her to go along with their way of life and force her to come to terms with everything.

This was a generally frustrating and overall problematic effort. One of the best attributes of this one stems from the idea that the mundane nature of life is used as a way of allowing the unnatural moments to seep into things. Spending quite a bit of time with the initial meetup between the granddaughter and her grandparents by spending time together, going through their routines, or meeting up with the childhood friend who lives nearby, the whole affair initially comes off with the kind of normalcy that greets her enthusiasm and joy at undergoing the trip to begin with. That means seeing the general sense of everything in a familiar fashion ends up making this one far more unnerving when those more off-kilter elements occur that are treated with a similar sense of indifference, which causes her entire world to flip upside down. While that becomes intriguing enough overall with the investigation into what's going on and taking the revelation about what's going on, leading to a series of dark concepts in play, not all of them land with much impact. The central idea that happiness is an abstract idea that must be passed around for others to enjoy rather than hoarded makes no sense at all and leaves the film without a horrifying central concept to get much horror mileage out of. This needed more than just bizarre, half-explained cryptic bits of nonsense to spell out as this makes for a confusing enough narrative that there's little about it to be scared of with only a few select moments here to try to work it out since the rest of the time is spent on the interactions within the family as they meet back up. It's an idea that helps to make things far more intriguing when they get brought up during the time in the village, but it makes for a confusing, overly sluggish experience.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence, Language, and themes of elderly abuse.

Very unusual Japanese horror movie, especially when considered alongside the classic J-horror cycle. As rooted in grudges and revenge as many movies from that cycle were, Best Wishes to All takes that cynicism to a whole new level and sets it amid an outright pessimism I don't remember being a part of any of those movies. The story goes that there is only so much happiness to go around, and the residents of a rural Japanese community have figured out how to get more than their fair share. Thematically, the horror in this movie conveys anxiety over the exodus of young people from rural Japan as they move into city centers, the related rapid decline of economic opportunities in those rural communities, combined with their aging population. This movie does not try to be subtle, which is part of its effectiveness. Along with that theme is another pertaining to parasitic self-centeredness which emerges later in the plot. It's not so much a universal theme, per se, as global, being nearly analogous to a pandemic.

There are some creepy moments in Best Wishes to All, largely reflected in the idiosyncratic behavior of some of the characters, but the real horror mostly stems from the appalling lengths they are willing to go to to achieve what they have convinced themselves to be "happiness."

This is a very effective horror movie, but it is so dark that I doubt I would be able to watch it again. Nonetheless, any fan of Japanese or horror writ large should consider it a must-see.