Mina ni ko are
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Best Wishes to All is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Yûta Shimotsu
FEATURING: Kotone Furukawa, Masashi Arifuku, Yoshiko Inuyama
PLOT: A nursing student returns from Tokyo to visit her grandparents remote village, where she finds they are acting oddly.
COMMENTS: We first meet the nameless young star of Best Wishes to All as a kindly nursing student who, based on sinister musical cues and subtle expressions, seems nervous to travel back to the village she grew up in to visit her aging grandparents. Part of her reluctance may be the family’s obsession with happiness. Since she was a young girl, they have been asking her “are you happy?”; her affirmative replies ring uncomfortably insincere. Dim, disturbing memories from childhood centered around bumps in the night and a perpetually locked door in the upper level of the house also give her pause. And perhaps she also foresees her outwardly pleasant grandparents’ odd behavior, such as their tendency to snort like pigs when eating pork.
In fact, their strange habits are accelerating, to the point where the heroine wonders if they might be experiencing dementia. But her own reactions become equally strange as the movie goes on. Relatively early on, the true horror of the situation is revealed; and while, at first, our heroine reacts as expected, then the movie shifts into a more dreamlike register. Beginning with an absurd automotive accident, the semi-logical horror story dissolves into a more impressionistic and nightmarish experience. It goes from ominously eccentric to full-on surreal, ending up in blood, betrayal, and, somehow, a middle aged man dancing in his underwear.
The village nonchalantly accepts the unnatural brutality of the movie’s premise, and the heroine is pressured into believing that this is just the way of the world. The happiness of the lion is the misery of the gazelle. Best Wishes to All posits the logically questionable but metaphorically sound proposition, “does the happiness of one person require the misery of another?” Although the thesis, taken literally, is absurd, the hypothetical is provocative. Who makes the smartphones, coffee, chocolate, diamonds, pornography, and food that you enjoy in your daily life? Wouldn’t you be happier if you didn’t know? Or, at least, if you could pretend that you don’t?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: