'Plan 75' review: Haunting Japanese Heartbreaker imagines a dystopia that could start any day now

On July 26, 2016, a 26-year-old former employee of a Japanese nursing home for people with intellectual and mental disabilities broke into his former workplace and stabbed 19 helpless patients to death in their beds. Believing that his massacre was a kind of mercy for his victims - and a noble sacrifice for the benefit of the whole nation - the killer wrote that he envisioned "a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with the consent of his guardians , when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities.”

The killer claimed this was a necessary step to protect the economy of the fastest aging country; an economy that is further stressed by the highest life expectancy of any country on Earth, and crushes its young people under the financial burden of paying for that longevity in the face of Japan's strained pension funds. He claimed that the elderly recognize themselves as the personification of this burden and desperately search for a way to resolve the drawbacks of their own immortality.

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The mass slaughter at Sagamihara was such a casual and horrifying act of civil violence that it seemed to owe as much to contemporary American fascism as to historical Japanese notions (and also) of nationalist self-denial, but the killer was confident that his bloodshed would strike a particularly dissonant chord in a country where disturbing one's neighbors is often internalized as an immortal act.

Judging by Chie Hayakawa's powerful and eerily benign “Plan 75” — a scripted drama born out of the macabre plausibility of the murderer's vision — he might have been right. The scariest thing about Hayakawa's film is not its familiar depiction of a society that values ​​human production over human dignity, but rather its gentle dystopian sketch of a society capable of circumventing dehumanization and/or sell it as an act of grace. .



A loose knot of interconnected stories that often suggests a twisted inversion of Hirokazu Kore-eda's "After Life" (Hayakawa taps into that film's slow-motion urgency, even if it fails to match its transcendent effect ), "Plan 75" is held together by the contemplative nature of its approach and the gentleness of its argumentation, both of which allow this film to smash the economic case for euthanasia without alienating those of us who believe the right to merciful end-of-life care.< /p>

The film opens with its most shocking and aggressive scene as a sort of bait and switch: an oblique staging of Sagamihara's attack that creates an alternate reality in which Japan has actually agreed to the killer's terms. In the Hayakawa drama, the massacre is just one of many age-related and financially motivated hate crimes that have prompted the government to create a social welfare program in which citizens over the age of 74 can volunteer to be euthanized in exchange for $1,000. /p>

But this pittance is not the real incentive. For one thing, you can't take it with you. On the other hand, the program is designed to target people who have no one to spend it with. Plan 75 is meant to attract - or coerce - lonely retirees with tedious jobs who feel like leaving the world before their time might be more gracious than extending their home.

Of course, it doesn't matter how friendly Plan 75's young staff are (Hayakawa wisely neglects to show us higher-level government functions), or how personalized the onboarding process is for each volunteer (both that it doesn't take too long). The minute Plan 75 was enacted, it imposed an unbearable expectation on any Japanese citizen over a certain age.

Now it's like, with every breath, they have to justify their continued existence to everyone they meet. And to themselves. That kind of pressure could strain the hand of even the most loved and supported person in their twilight years, let alone a semi-frail and seemingly familyless maid like Michi (Chieko Baisho). From the moment this movie begins, it's only a matter of time before she starts filling out the paperwork and getting ready for cremation.