A young nurse (Kotone Furukawa) goes to visit her grandparents (Masashi Arifuku and Yoshiko Inuyama), who live in the countryside that surrounds the more urban places in Japan, and learns the hard way how they have stayed so jovial into their old age.

Director Yûta Shimotsu’s first movie — this is based on his short film Dreaming to Accept Reality and was produced by Takashi Shimizu (Tomie: Re-birth) — it has sell copy that promises that this “unsettling debut draws from classics like Audition and The Wicker Man to create a wholly unique vision.”

Take this advice anywhere you live: Never go back home. Nothing good happens there. The place where you grew up is much more sinister than how you remember it. Now it is a place of random violence, people asking you to save them and you’ll be trapped in either a ghost story or a J-horror film. Stay where you are. The world is a big enough nightmare without you messing around. You don’t need to find your grandparents oinking like pigs and touching their eyeballs or need to meet the strange beings that are staying inside their home.

I’m used to Japan influencing Western movies, not looking to make Midsommar up north.

The 2025 Overlook Film Festival takes place April 3 to 6. To learn more, click here.