Metacritic-Rezensionen

Legislation has passed to fix Japan’s “aging problem,” and temper hate crimes against the elderly: anyone over the age of seventy-five can apply for government-funded assisted suicide. From this bleak premise, Chie Hayakawa’s beautifully humanist Plan 75 takes flight.

Plan 75 isn’t for or against assisted suicide, but it tenderly laments a society in which “death with dignity” is only offered as compensation for a life without it.

Plan 75 may seem like it’s about ageing, but more accurately it is about the importance of community — the hope that someone will remember us after we’re gone.

Because so much of Hayakawa’s film is given over to depictions of the procedures, formalities, and impersonal administration that define Plan 75, even the tiniest spark of feeling comes as a relief.

There are things to cherish: busily moving between sterile offices and boxy, lived-in apartments, the film keeps you guessing about the practicalities and implications of its central conceit to such an extent that its moments of real poignancy can catch you off guard. A lot of this comes down to Baisho’s heartbreaking central performance.

These character arcs play out in subtle, naturalistic ways, with restrained performances that underline the tension between the film’s polite surface and unsettling subtext.

Plan 75 might have been a risible exercise in emotional manipulation if not for the sensitive tone with which Hiyakawa approaches all of her characters.

Baisho gets across the creeping despair that morbidity and the loss of community can create — a sensation that lets Plan 75 double as a consummate entry in pandemic-era cinema.

Hayakawa keeps her story at an intimate and, for the most part, effective human scale. Baisho’s beautifully calibrated performance holds us close, turning Michi’s every step — a brief stint as a traffic guard, a trip to a cafe she once frequented with her husband — into a quiet act of resistance against her perceived uselessness.

Plan 75 rarely manipulates and never tugs so hard at the heartstrings that it breaks your heart. Honestly, I think it needs to.