Metacritic reviews

Showcasing a harrowing horror story about the cost of happiness, Best Wishes to All is a terrifying, twisted tale that never lets up on the scary revelations it keeps unearthing.

Despondent and gloomy even while it’s against a backdrop of bucolic beauty, director Yûta Shimotsu’s debut feature “Best Wishes to All” is the type of unsettling, high-concept horror film that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with unforgiving verve.

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 is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.