Naoko (Ayaka Onishi), the protagonist of Kenta Ikeda's thriller "Strangers," is a pretender. She pretends to care about her fiance; to be a quiet “good girl”; to care about what others think about her. So it’s not a stretch when Naoko starts doing another kind of pretending — taking on the identity of a former colleague after she goes missing.
That colleague, fellow office worker Saki (Hyunri Lee), seems to be the opposite of Naoko: flirtatious, carefree, untethered. After the two bond, Saki tells Naoko about her side gig: going out on dates with older men for large sums of money, or “papa-katsu.” It’s not all about the money, though. Saki contends that pretend relationships actually allow people to bare their souls in a way real relationships don’t, especially when real ones reach the stage where partners stop finding each other so interesting.
One night, the pair go out on the town, and Naoko somehow ends up taking Saki’s smartphone home — after which Saki stops showing up at the office. Naoko then fields a call on Saki’s phone, who sets her up with a new potential client. “It doesn’t matter that you’re not Saki,” says the man on the phone ominously. “We don’t even care if you stole her phone, as long as you show up.”
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