Director: Yuta Shimotsu
Year: 2023
Country: Japan
Alternate Titles: Mina ni sachi are; Best Regards to All
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Heading to her grandparents’ house, a woman tries to use the experience to get closer to her grandparents only for her to notice their eccentric and off-beat behavior is indicative of the rest of the village who expect her to go along with their way of life and force her to come to terms with everything.
Review:
This was a generally frustrating and overall problematic effort. One of the best attributes of this one stems from the idea that the mundane nature of life is used as a way of allowing the unnatural moments to seep into things. Spending quite a bit of time with the initial meetup between the granddaughter and her grandparents by spending time together, going through their routines, or meeting up with the childhood friend who lies nearby, the whole affair initially comes off with the kind of normalcy that greets her enthusiasm and joy at undergoing the trip to begin with. That means seeing the general sense of everything in a familiar fashion ends up making this one far more unnerving when those more off-kilter elements occur that are treated with a similar sense of indifference, which causes her entire world to flip upside down.
While that becomes intriguing enough overall with the investigation into what’s going on and taking the revelation about what’s going on leading to a series of dark concepts in play, not all of them land with much impact. The central idea that happiness is an abstract idea that must be passed around for others to enjoy rather than hoarded makes no sense at all and leaves the film without a horrifying central concept to get much horror mileage out of. This really needed more than just bizarre, half-explained cryptic bits of nonsense to spell out as this makes for a confusing enough narrative that there’s little about it to be scared of with only a few select moments here to try to work it out since the rest of the time is spent on the interactions within the family as they meet back up. It’s an idea that helps to make things far more intriguing when they get brought up during the time in the village, but it makes for a confusing, overly sluggish experience.
Overview: **.5/5
An enjoyable enough time here even though it does fall flat at times, there’s still enough here to make this a solid time while being brought down by the flaws present into a decent overall feature. Give it a shot if this kind of genre effort is appealing or are not put off by the flaws present while most others out there should heed caution with this one.
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