brendan halpin

So I watched 2 Japanese horror movies over the weekend. I wasn’t doing a theme night or anything—I just like watching horror movies from other countries and cultures because even indie American horror movies tend to lean pretty hard on familiar tropes, whereas outside of the US, you get filmmakers making weird, idiosyncratic movies that are harder to find here. (See, for example, Oddity or Frewaka, both from Ireland, both excellent.)

Anyway, the first is a classic I had never seen before: 2005’s Noroi: The Curse. While this is a found footage movie, it deviates from the blueprint laid out by The Blair Witch Project, which is “idiots blunder into a dangerous situation, everything goes sideways, everybody dies.” (See also, Hell House LLC, Deadstream, Willow Creek.) (Actually don’t see Willow Creek. It sucks. The other 2 are great, though).

This movie concerns a guy who more or less knows what he’s doing—he makes paranormal documentaries, and the movie is ostensibly the footage from the last thing he shot, which is an investigation of a weird curse that seems to be killing a lot of people. You want weird rituals? Creepy kids? A town drowned by the construction of a dam? You got it, baby! I found this movie very creepy and unsettling, which of course is the goal. The dread is pervasive, and the mood is dark, but never too dark, because we get carried along in the main character’s certainty that this thing can be understood and solved. SPOILER: He’s half right!

Speaking of unsettling, Best Wishes to All is profoundly unsettling because it indicts the audience. And, indeed, everyone who lives in a comparatively wealthy country. I don’t want to say too much about it because I thought I got what was happening early on but then was surprised. Let’s just say this: a young nursing student who lives in Tokyo goes to stay with her grandparents in the country for a few days. And she learns some very uncomfortable truths about her family and her society.

That’s it. This movie could have given us a Satanic cult from the horror movie playbook, but instead it forces us to ask uncomfortable moral questions of ourselves. I can’t really say more without spoiling it, so I’ll just say this: my absolute highest recommendation for this movie. Certainly the best thing I’ve seen all year.