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.
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