This strange, melancholy film from Japan effectively makes the (unfashionable) case against euthanasia: that old people won’t want to be a bother or appear selfish and so will feel pressured into accepting state medicide. Director and co-writer Chie Hayakawa imagines a future in which Japan, burdened with an ageing population, proposes a supposedly voluntary but actually insidiously coercive arrangement called Plan 75, in which citizens of 75 years and above can sign up for an easeful death in return for 1,000 dollars which they can either spend on themselves or give away to their family. The system becomes a success, to the extent that a chilling Plan 65 is mooted, and the drama shows us how this creates a new burden for old people: the burden of explaining to themselves why they don’t just do the rational thing and end it all.
