From what I can gather, Best Wishes To All is a feature debut from director/co-writer Yûta Shimotsu. It's a damned impressive one, and one that brings to mind a number of other titles (although nothing feels too familiar as the tone of the film settles into something enjoyably strange and chilling).
Kotone Furukawa is a young woman who goes to spend some time with her grandparents (Masashi Arifuki and Yoshiko Inuyama), only to discover that they have quite the dark secret in their lives. Only . . . maybe it's not so secret. Maybe it was just being kept secret from their granddaughter, until she was ready to find out all about it.
I'm not going to name the films that popped into my head while watching this, but horror fans should find it unavoidable to consider the influences of Takashi Miike and Demián Rugna on something that works the grotesque and macabre into something that also feels so placed in the here and now. The small village setting may be more isolated, but the repercussions spread out far beyond this one area, and the fact that a couple of key scenes take place in broad daylight show a welcome step away from the look and feel of many other fantastic Japanese horrors we've seen throughout the years. There's also a hint of M. Night Shyamalan here, but maybe that's just me thinking of one particular film from him, which may just be a coincidental comparison point due to the main premise.
Furukawa does well in her role. It's interesting that none of the main characters are named. Viewers get to watch them as nothing more than interconnected family members, for the most part, and that is in line with everything being explored here (family history, sacrifice, beliefs/traditions passed down for generations). Furukawa has the most development here, as you might expect with her being the lead, and it's rewarding to compare her starting point with how she acts in the finale. Both Arifuki and Inuyama are entertainingly strange, having their own fun in ways that bemuse and unsettle Furukawa, and their age and vulnerability help make them more interesting than they otherwise might have been. There are some others onscreen, but the main one to mention is a friend played by Kôya Matsudai, another great performance alongside those strong leads.
Shimotsu directs with a confidence that belies the fact this is a debut, but they are also helped by the cast, and the sparse, but no less substantial, screenplay co-written with Rumi Kakuta. This delivers effective frights, as well as some occasional tension, but also manages to maintain a light enough touch as it explores strained family relations in a nightmare scenario that works to regress a young woman back to the frightened little girl she once was.
8/10
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