‘Best Wishes to All’: Home is where the horror is

Horror movies don’t have to make sense to be scary. When a ghost’s hand shoots up from murky bath water to grab the heroine’s wrist, your heart leaps even though a spook with a vise-like grip is impossible in reality.

Yuta Shimotsu’s first feature, ironically titled “Best Wishes to All,” delivers more than a jump scare or two. Based on a prize-winning short film and produced by horror maestro Takashi Shimizu, it is a plunge into a nightmarish world in which the bizarre and disturbing are accepted with a smile as ordinary and unavoidable.

While Shimotsu can create shocks from a gesture or glance without showy effects, he can’t quite fill the gaping holes in Rumi Kakuta’s script. The result is a film that strains to say something true about human nature, but its metaphorical reach exceeds its narrative grasp.

Star Kotone Furukawa, who appeared in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s acclaimed 2021 anthology, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” not only satisfies the usual job description of a horror heroine, starting with a good scream, but she also excels as the lone, quailing representative of ordinary humanity in a world gone mad.

The film, however, sidesteps answering the nagging question of why her character, a nameless nursing student who returns to her countryside home from Tokyo, views the evil around her with such surprise and alarm. Wasn’t she raised in this town? But as a strange elderly woman she encounters deep in the forest observes, the whole shebang may be an illusion, like a digital landscape viewed through a pair of virtual reality goggles.

The student’s visit to her grandparent’s rambling Japanese-style house begins normally enough. Then, while rifling through an old album, she finds a family photo with a girl’s face scratched out — a sure marker in J-horror that the supernatural is about to make a skin-crawling appearance.

Only it doesn’t. Instead of seeing ghosts, the student hears strange bumps, and at dinner, she watches in silent distress as her grandparents suddenly oink like pigs in unison. This is just the beginning of their creepy behavior, which baffles and frightens her. Are they going senile, or is there another, more sinister reason for their weirdness?

Out for a walk to restore her sanity, she encounters a young farmer (Koya Matsudai) when he stops to help a schoolboy fix his bike. This nice guy, who turns out to be an old classmate, asks why she wants to be a nurse. “To save people” she answers. “Save me,” he says, and he is not just being flirtatious.

From here, I will only say that certain villagers claim to derive their happiness from the suffering of a lower order of beings, such as the one making the bumps. Those, like the farmer, who do not possess such a being (which the locals do not consider human) are doomed to hardship and pain.

Ritual sacrifice is a familiar trope in horror films — see Ari Aster’s “Midsommar” for a recent example — but something else is going on in “Best Wishes to All” that feels sourced less from abhorrent cultural practices than the fragments of bad dreams reenacted with striking theatrical flourishes, if not a lot of internal logic.

The underlying message, “society needs exploitation to thrive,” is both obvious and depressing. But it’s also hard to flatly deny — or to dismiss the film’s more unsettling images, even after the lights go up.