Best Wishes to All Review: Cruel Awakening

Best Wishes to All is a fantastic horror movie that radiates evil, as it reveals a world in which happiness is limited and any goodwill is punished.

It’s a sentiment that feels uncomfortably real at the moment, and it’s an ingenious jumping-off point for a horror movie.

Our protagonist is a young woman (Kotone Furukawa, of Cloud), who visits her grandparents in the countryside. We never learn her name, but she’s a kind person that helps others where she can and is about to become a nurse. She’s a bit apprehensive about arriving at her grandparent’s house alone; her mother will only join them a couple of days later, and who can blame her, given that her core childhood memory of the place seems to be about a locked door in the attic from behind which she hears a mysterious knocking in the night? When she arrives, she’s quickly proven right about her worries, as weird things start to happen almost immediately.

When they have dinner together, rumblings from the attic can be heard again, but before our protagonist can react, the situation gets even weirder: the grandparents suddenly start to oink like pigs and totally disassociate from the conversation before eventually returning by exclaiming that the pigs told them they are happy to be eaten. In the following evening and night, the young girl comes across her grandparents standing in the hallway completely motionless, and when a man who has his eyes and mouth sewn shut comes crawling into the living room, before being casually dragged out again by the grandparents, during breakfast the next morning, it’s clear that there’s something very wrong going on here.

Best Wishes to All isn’t a slow-burn horror movie; it throws you into the deep end as soon as our protagonist arrives at their grandparent’s house and only escalates further from there. The main character is systemically punished and broken down until she accepts the reality of this savage world, and we can feel her growing despair as she refuses to do so. There’s a real focus on her psychological state as we watch it crumble under a series of inhumane actions by the people around her. Once the movie reaches a certain point, it retires some of the classic tropes of the genre the beginning plays with and really hones in on the disconnect between the main character and her environment. The horror then comes from her inability to reconcile her own worldview with the brutal reality and her desperation to find good in a world that doesn’t have any of it.

What makes this film especially chilling is the absolute apathy showcased by basically every character but the protagonist. The world that’s depicted here is such a cold one where a dog-eat-dog mentality is taken to the absolute extreme. When happiness is limited, how can you ensure that your family is the one to receive it? It’s all the more upsetting that it feels so true to the current moment, where people already in power will strip the ones who have less of even their most basic needs until they have nothing left. It’s so easy to do the worst things to another person once you strip them of their humanity or consider them beneath you.

J-Horror can be a particularly cruel subgenre of horror, and with Takashi Shimizu, director of 2002’s Ju-on: The Grudge, putting his name behind the project as executive producer, you already know Best Wishes to All is a worthy entry into the canon. As a feature debut, it’s outstanding; whatever director Yūta Shimotsu and writer Rumi Kakuta do next is, without a doubt, worth keeping an eye on.

Best Wishes to All will be available to stream on Shudder on June 13, 2025.