Shocked by a dwindling sense of empathy in her native Japan, director Chie Hayakawa imagines a trenchant scenario in which the government coaxes the elderly into voluntary euthanasia to address the country's aging population.
“I was enraged and thought, if Japan were to accelerate down this path of intolerance, what would it look like?” Hayakawa says. Her conclusion was Hayakawa’s debut feature, expanded from a 2018 short, imagines a future Japan in which the government has introduced a policy offering all citizens above the age of 75 with an all-expenses-paid voluntary euthanasia service.
Hayakawa says she interviewed 15 elderly Japanese women of various background as research during the film’s development. All of them told her that if a program like Plan 75 existed, they would probably consider it, “because they don’t want to be a burden.” “In Japanese culture, we are so bound by this idea that you should not trouble other people and that doing so is very inappropriate and shameful,” Hayakawa says. “It makes it almost impossible for us to ask for help,” she adds. “Ultimately, I wanted this film to wake the audience up and remind them to have empathy.” doesn’t take its concept to absurdist lengths or employ a heightened sci-fi aesthetic.
“People tend to expect the film to be a futuristic sci-fi, but I felt it would be more effective to help the audience imagine that this society is just an extension of our real world today,” she says. follows an elegant, elderly woman as her options gradually dwindle: Unlucky in marriage and childless, she has no immediate family to spend time with; her dearest friend passes away abruptly; decent work at her age becomes harder and harder to come by, pushing self-sufficiency out of grasp.
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