In a short story from 1973 called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," writer Ursula K. Le Guin considers the worth of happiness. Overflowing with joy and prosperity, Omelas is a gem of a city, a veritable marvel for its unblemished health and wellbeing — everybody in the town, from young to old, is intelligent, kind and successful.
The city itself knows no failure, but it does harbour a secret: in a tiny room the size of a broom closet in the basement of a building sits a child no older than 10 years of age in his own filth. Locked up and unclothed, he sits shrouded in darkness without respite. Each day, someone delivers him a paltry supply of food each day, as his brain dulls from isolation. Unable to speak or cry anymore, the boy teeters on the edge of death, and this is the point. The boy's suffering is the necessary condition for Omelas's beauty, safety and perfection.
Le Guin's story acts a bit like a thought experiment: she asks us whether one innocent person's suffering is worth the happiness of thousands. If the boy were brought above ground, if he were rescued, then the entire city would be imperiled, people would die, everything would turn to dust. Of course, Le Guin's point is that we've built a world where millions of innocents suffer and die regularly so that millions of others might live in comfort. It's heartbreaking, but we've done this to ourselves.
Can we allow such a world to exist? Yûta Shimotsu asks this question, too, in his debut feature Best Wishes to All, adding a jubilant grotesquerie to Le Guin's heady proposition. In turns dire and ironic, Best Wishes to All offers a worthwhile portrait of the absurdity inherent to modern happiness, carrying in its visual horror the immediacy of Le Guin's message, though perhaps not her philosophical heft. Though rough and frayed around the edges, Best Wishes to All serves as a valiant debut from a budding talent.
Shimotsu writes and directs the film, which follows a young nursing student (Kotone Furukawa) on a visit to her grandparents, during which she discovers a horrible secret in a room high up in their house. It's something the girl has been ambiently aware of all her life, but it becomes clarion clear to her on this latest visit: her grandparents' and indeed her entire family's happiness depends upon the viscera of a person kept locked up in the attic.
The homemade miso paste that the family uses to make savoury soups for dinner, over which they consider their happiness, is culled from the innards of the person in the attic. The film has the protagonist reckon with her own actions and responsibility. As it dawns on her that all of her successes come from the strange soup she has been consuming all her life, she recoils and squirms. The protagonist is not just a girl turning away from her family, but also from herself.
Shimotsu's understanding of body horror is sharp and vibrant. Channeling the carnivals of grotesqueries mastered by the likes of Takashi Miike and Takashi Shimizu, Best Wishes to All is unflinching as it presents us with gushing, spewing and congealing blood, leaky but bandaged wounds, and dried up bodies that have given up as much of their guts as possible. It's squirm inducing in the way that all of Miike's and Shimizu's best films are, suggesting in Shimotsu an intuitive prowess for the genre.
The horrors don't end at the visual level, either — the script offers us lyrical and verbal monstrosities, too. It's in the way the grandparents talk about pork, about how a pig's function is to feed humans, all while the family eats pork. The juxtaposition is noxious enough to turn meat-eaters into vegetarians. It's in the way one character describes what will happen to each of the family's bodies if they don't keep a prisoner captive in the attic. It's all vulgar and creepy, and oh so delicious.
The film's weaknesses come at the narrative level. Shimotsu hasn't fully landed upon an understanding of the motivations fuelling the world he built. While we have a clear image of what it looks like to sap a person of their lifeblood to feed others, we don't also receive a singular or legible understanding of how we got here. This lack of clarity would be fine if the film didn't take pains to offer us explanations.
We receive monologues by ancillary characters rhapsodizing about how the world doles out happiness in unequal measure, or about how the young should make sacrifices for the old, or a suggestion that everything we're seeing might be virtual reality. Shimotsu could have left things simple in the way that Le Guin does in her story, saying that the bargain of one life for many is simply how the world works, but he doesn't. He tries to arrive at a precise first cause for the current state of affairs, but he hasn't made up his mind yet about what is really going on here.
It is ultimately unclear what the rules of the game are. At one point, the grandmother becomes pregnant and it is suggested by the family that this baby might become the attic prisoner, but it is also suggested by other elders in the community that the protagonist should become the attic prisoner, but it is also suggested by the grandmother the protagonist should venture out into the world and poach a man so that he can become the attic prisoner. It's all a bit muddy and confusing, and the story could have been better edited or pruned.
But even as Best Wishes to All falls short of greatness, Shimotsu still crafts a compelling watch by turning us both inward and outward, recalling Le Guin's brilliant story, forcing us to reckon with our own culpability in the world's machinations. This is a film that creeps under the skin by virtue of its nastiness and fearlessness in presenting us with the violence we have become habituated to. Shimotsu shows us, in the most brutal way, that not only are we capable of inflicting pain, we have likely been doing it for all our lives.