113 min | NR | April 21, 2023 | KimStim
Japan’s government offers citizens over seventy-five a deal. Choose death, and the state covers the bonus, the paperwork, and a friendly voice on the phone. Chie Hayakawa turns euthanasia into a customer-service transaction, and the horror is how reasonable everyone sounds.
A near-future Japan faces a graying population and a restless resentment toward the old. The government’s answer is Plan 75. Any citizen seventy-five or older can volunteer for a state-administered death, sweetened by a cash bonus and a courteous call center. Michi Tsunotani is a widow in her late seventies who cleans hotel rooms until age costs her the job and then the apartment. The film tracks how a society decides its elderly are a line item and then markets their removal as freedom and grace. Chie Hayakawa builds the whole machine out of politeness.
Chieko Baisho plays Michi with a stillness that never asks for pity. She keeps her routines, irons her clothes, and answers the program’s pitch with the calm of a woman who has run out of other doors. Hayato Isomura plays Hiromu Okabe, a young Plan 75 salesman who processes the paperwork until his own estranged uncle appears on his roster. Yuumi Kawai plays Haruko Narimiya, a call center operator paid to give each client a warm fifteen-minute conversation before the end. Stefanie Arianne plays Maria, a Filipina worker who sorts the belongings of the dead to fund her daughter’s surgery. Each performance locates the small human cost inside a system designed to feel frictionless.
Hayakawa writes and directs her first feature with deliberate cool. She shoots the program’s recruitment booths and brochures like a consumer marketing campaign, all clean light, soft voices, and reassuring pastel design. The offices hum with fluorescent calm and the institutional sound of phones and printers. The camera holds still and frames the elderly small against the architecture that is processing them. The score stays sparse and refuses to tell the audience how to feel. Horror works best when it wears a customer-service smile.
The premise is a loaded gun and Hayakawa never fully fires it. She makes her point in the first act and then repeats it in a lower register for the rest of the film. The dystopia stays muted and the satire stays polite, which is the intent and also the limit. The quiet is what makes Plan 75 unnerving and what keeps it from cutting deeper. Baisho holds the center and gives the film a face worth following all the way to the edge. The result lingers as a warning that the cruelest policies arrive dressed as kindness.