‘The Real You’: Provocative dystopia combines sci-fi concerns with melodrama

In the novel “1984,” George Orwell imagined the near-future as an authoritarian hellscape: Big Brother was not only watching you but also torturing you — or sending you down the memory hole.

Dystopias portrayed in recent Japanese films, however, give a more benign countenance to society’s rulers. In Chie Hayakawa’s “Plan 75” (2022), for example, smiling bureaucrats beguile the elderly into joining a state-sponsored assisted-suicide scheme.

In Yuya Ishii’s provocative if narratively lumpy “The Real You,” the powers-that-be have instituted a similar “elective death” program with benefits for participants and their survivors. But as factory worker Sakuya Ishikawa (Sosuke Ikematsu) discovers to his dismay, the world has advanced far beyond the simple culling of aged undesirables.

When he tries to rescue his mother (Yuko Tanaka) from a raging river in a driving rainstorm (the result of an intensifying climate crisis), Sakuya is knocked into a coma and awakens a year later to find that Mom is gone — another “elective death” recruit — and everything around him has changed, beginning with the elimination of his job by automation.

With the encouragement of his criminally inclined pal Kishitani (Koshi Mizukami), Sakuya becomes a “real avatar,” a flesh-and-blood stand-in for an assortment of clients, such as a dying man who wants to virtually experience his last sunset at the seaside, with Sakuya operating the digital gear. But malicious clients can threaten his livelihood if he doesn’t do what is personally repulsive or outright illegal.

Sakuya then makes the acquaintance of Masato Nozaki (Satoshi Tsumabuki), a smooth-talking developer of “virtual figures,” re-creations of the dead made using harvested data and viewed through VR goggles. They are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, which Sakura finds both disturbing and enticing. He decides to reanimate Mom and ask her why she decided to end it all without telling him.

Based on a novel by Keiichiro Hirano, “The Real You” combines classic sci-fi concerns about the rise of artificial entities with familiar Japanese movie melodrama about dark family secrets.

Working from his own script, Ishii conjures up a mood of gathering dread in the film’s opening scenes, when the pure-hearted Sakuya is wrestling with his desire to be reunited with his beloved mother and his unease about virtually resurrecting her.

A complication arrives in the form of Ayaka Miyoshi (Ayaka Miyoshi), a young former sex worker who was his mom’s unlikely closest friend. Once she takes up residence in Sakuya’s apartment (she has become homeless in another natural disaster), the story begins to shift from straight-line futuristic speculation to tangled psychodrama.

Ayaka, it turns out, bears a striking (though never shown) resemblance to a high school classmate Sakuya once had a crush on and never got over. His VF mother tells him they are in fact one and the same, but does she really know or is she regurgitating corrupted data?

The third-act introduction of a romantic triangle featuring Sakuya, Ayaka and an avatar designer (an almost unrecognizable Taiga Nakano) comes across as forced, but in Ikematsu’s deep-dive performance, Sakuya’s existential crisis feels very much of the present moment.

As a “real avatar” he is a despised slave to his clients’ whims. What is his purpose? His VR mother may have an answer, but how much can he trust it? Probably about as much as any of us can trust the algorithms our social media masters have kindly crafted for us.