Best Wishes to All Review: Happiness Demands an Evil Price

Happiness Demands an Evil Price in Bleak Japanese Horror Best Wishes to All

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Happiness is a concept so elemental and basic to the human experience that it can actually be rather difficult to define when we step back far enough to attempt to consider it in the abstract. What does it mean to be happy? Is happiness an ephemeral, fleeting thing, or an underlying state? How does one earn happiness, or deserve to receive it? What are we willing to sacrifice for it? And can anyone really be happy on their own, through virtue alone, bereft of greed or ego? Perhaps in a world with a finite supply of happiness, every ounce of happiness means an equally weighted unit of suffering for someone else to make it possible. That’s more or less the bleak conclusion of Shudder’s Best Wishes to All, a startling new Japanese horror feature debut from director Yūta Shimotsu and writer Rumi Kakuta. An occasionally inscrutable and tonally unpredictable look at family, (lack of) empathy, self-centeredness and societal (and generational) rot, the film veers wildly between the genuinely disturbing and cynically comedic as it indicts Japanese society’s particular ennui toward happiness, satisfaction and aging.

The film’s universally unnamed characters are clearly meant to stand in for various archetypes in modern Japanese society. There’s a pair of disturbing grandparents, who represent the swelling ranks of the Japanese senior citizens plagued by loneliness and crumbling support systems, concerned about their fleeting happiness in twilight years. And there’s the college-aged granddaughter and protagonist played by Kotone Furukawa, who represents the dwindling number of young bodies in Japan, who are needed in order to keep the capitalistic system chugging along, to prop up the growing legions of elderly. Best Wishes to All makes literal the idea that the young generation is increasingly being sacrificed and denied their own autonomous life, in order to keep the wobbling system going.

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For its first 30 minutes or so, this will all feel quite familiar to horror geeks, seeming to slot into what we would describe as the “elder horror” subgenre. Furukawa’s granddaughter character hasn’t seen her rurally based grandparents in years, living as she does in the metropolitan anonymity of Tokyo, and she harbors only the slightly unnerving memories of having heard and seen disturbing things at their home when she was a young child. When she arrives to visit Grandma and Grandpa, several days before her parents are scheduled to arrive, the pair are effusively welcoming and loving, constantly steering the conversation toward whether or not she is experiencing “happiness.” But the creepy behavior likewise begins immediately: At dinner, the grandparents begin making strange oinking, snorting and snuffling sounds, even as Furukawa overhears chilling sounds in the house and observes them doing things like standing catatonically in the hallways or slamming into closed doors. The grandparents make cryptic references to sacrifice and slaughter. A horror-savvy viewer would be forgiven for thinking that they were watching something in the vein of a Japanese take on other elder horror entries like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, or The Taking of Deborah Logan. You start to worry that Best Wishes to All will be unable to break itself away from adherence to “these people are constantly doing strange things, but it would be unthinkably rude for me to address it, so I have no choice but to just ignore it” horror tropes.

These conventional horror beats, however, are thankfully only the opening course of what Best Wishes to All ultimately has in store, and it begins to make itself more memorably distinct through a series of mounting, misanthropic provocations that thrust Furukawa far past the point of being able to politely ignore the increasingly fucked-up and bizarre dynamic developing around her. This is where the film plays its best hand: Once Furukawa attempts to address the situation, she’s made to discover just how universal and widespread the societal rot around her really is, and how everyone else she encounters on a daily basis is casually participating in a dehumanizing system that tortures and punishes some individuals in order to feed the happiness of the more fortunate. This system is both metaphorical and literal: It is implied, but not explained in any detail, that a sort of supernatural force empowers ritualistic torture and violence in exchange for happiness, with deadly consequences also in place for those who want to stop participating. The unspecified nature of these folkloric beliefs, and our lack of understanding of any “rules” of the setting, reminds one of something like Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, which derives horror and suspense from the viewer’s lack of understanding of what is and is not an affront against the spiritual laws of the universe. As in that unnerving film, those viewers who demand to know the mechanics of the supernatural underpinnings here are going to be left frustrated, because nothing is ever codified. Not that they need to be.

What matters here is effectively a battle for the soul of Furukawa’s granddaughter, when she is confronted with a world that punishes and wishes to snuff out any hint of virtue and compassion. Furukawa is a young woman who is inherently a decent person: She’s training to be a nurse out of a wish to “save people,” and in the film’s opening moments she helps an elderly woman cross a busy intersection, only to be thanked with the line “I’m sorry that young people are sacrificed for old folks like me.” What’s so odd about Furukawa is that she’s somehow managed to get this far in life without anyone revealing to her the vast network of literal sacrifices that seems to empower this society: She is led to a grand realization of how deep this all goes, and even younger children and her peers seem fully aware of it. At one point she meets a group of teens, who mock her for her naivete, taunting “Do you still believe in Santa Claus too?” Furukawa doesn’t want to believe that she could have been so unaware about the reality of the world, but everywhere she goes in her grandparents’ rural community, she simply runs into more developing atrocities that prop up the superficial “happiness” she experiences in socially interacting with the locals.

The question becomes, then: Will this setting break Furukawa’s resolve, her sanity, or her determination? What other choice does she have, but to conform? Her mother, when she finally arrives, assures her that “life is like this everywhere,” that “happiness is limited on this earth, and people have been taking happiness from each other for ages.” Furukawa is ostracized, made to feel like she is the unnatural one for having compassion for those being tortured. She goes from seeing herself as an average, mundane member of society, to being set apart as the only sane or “moral” person in a world that is so many orders of magnitude more disturbed than she ever knew. In this way, Best Wishes to All is ultimately about society’s corrupting influence as it seeks to turn the average person into a monster, breaking down their ethical barriers with the promise of teaching you to prioritize the self. Few films weaponize so effectively the guilt and burden of unwanted responsibility placed on a person by their family, which here implies that they’ll all die unless Furukawa debases herself and drags herself down to their level.

Visually, the film contains a few striking sequences that make good use of perspective: Take, for instance, a shot of a crazed, tortured man stumbling down the road while our protagonist trots behind him, with the grandparents then following her farther in the background, all in one deep focus shot. There’s another memorable shot, meanwhile, that opens with both of the grandparents standing perfectly still in a doorway with blank looks on their faces, which holds in place for what feels like an eternity–maybe 20 seconds–before they say “goodnight,” and the camera pulls back a bit to reveal that they’ve been locked in some kind of silent face off/staring contest with the granddaughter this whole time. It’s deftly done and quite effectively creepy. On the other end of the spectrum, though, there are moments in Best Wishes to All that almost can’t help but come off as unintentionally funny–in particular, one shot of a man getting hit by a car that is so cartoonishly unrealistic and absurd that I can only imagine a theater full of viewers howling with laughter when they see it. These moments do undermine the bitingly cynical, hopeless tone the film is trying to establish, to some degree.

With that said, despite its occasionally impenetrable bizarrity, Best Wishes to All manages to stand out for the soul-sucking aura of nastiness that it emanates, the feeling that any good person will be chewed up and spit back out as something tarnished and broken in short order. If you’re short on happiness, but brimming in misanthropy, then it might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Director: Yūta Shimotsu
Writer: Rumi Kakuta
Stars: Kotone Furukawa, Koya Matsudai
Release date: June 13, 2025 (Shudder)

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.

Happiness Demands an Evil Price in Bleak Japanese Horror Best Wishes to All