Karōshi Teases A Revenge Quest That Would Make John Wick Proud
The team behind the action franchise unveils a new martial arts masterpiece.
For those who remember a time when manga and anime were niche interests, the concept of “weebing out” (in lay terms: wearing your love for Japanese culture on your sleeve) still feels like a faux pas. It’s something of a shock to see these interests go the way of fan fiction and comic books, filtering into the mainstream where otaku can celebrate it with abandon. But it’s true: anime is in now, matcha has become such a symbol of cool that vendors can hardly keep up, and action sagas like John Wick pay clear and decisive homage to samurai epics and Japan-set revenge thrillers.
John Wick director Chad Stahelski in particular has attached himself to a few films that feel like the total encapsulation of this new era. He’s helming an adaptation of the beloved video game Ghost of Tsushima, and (more immediately) producing an original thriller by Tsushima screenwriter Takashi Doscher.
On the surface, Karōshi reads like a Japanophile’s dream: it’s set in a parallel world where Japan is the global superpower, with Western nations embracing its currency and customs. “[It] was really inspired [by] me looking at some of the great Japanese corporations in the 1980s and imagining a world 40, 50 years from that time period,” Doscher explained at the film’s trailer launch event. “What if these Japanese corporations were just as influential as they were back then? How would that affect our design, our technology, our corporate culture?”
The first trailer for Karōshi teases some of the good that can come from that concept, but also a lot of bad. “Karōshi” literally translates to “death from overwork,” a phenomenon where stress incurred at work — from long hours to physical abuse — can lead to debilitating health issues. But karōshi is also self-inflicted: in the trailer’s opening moments, we watch as an employee at the fictional Ikigai Corporation jumps from the very top of a towering Manhattan skyscraper in response to poor working conditions.
This suicide shakes Karōshi’s main heroine, Jodie (Isabel May), to the core. Doscher describes her as a “true believer” in everything Ikigai represents, though from the trailer, it’s not clear if she’s been ignorant of the company’s oppressive work conditions or willfully complacent. Either way, she can no longer turn a blind eye when a new recruit, Hiro (Past Lives’ Teo Yoo), turns his first day at work into a quest for revenge. The Karōshi trailer plays a little like The Raid, a little like Harakiri, as Hiro sheds his mild-mannered persona and fights his way up to the executive levels. He’s hunting Ikigai’s CEO, Vincent Ogawa (Takehiro Hira); Hiro demands that he “tell the world the truth.” That might have something to do with the karōshi we witness at the top of the trailer, or a much deeper conspiracy.
Karōshi will tackle corporate greed just as “anti-samurai samurai films” critiqued Feudal Japan.
Whatever Ikigai is hiding, it’s going to be very fun watching Hiro uncover it. Doscher calls Karōshi “an anti-corporate corporate film,” not unlike what movies like Yojimbo brought out of the samurai genre.
“Some of our favorite samurai films are critiques of the samurai system,” continues Doscher. “They’re sort of anti-samurai samurai films: they’re poking holes at our romanticized view of samurai, of the feudal system that the samurai helped continue.”
All that is to say that what glitters in Karōshi is by no means gold. The film will walk a fine line critiquing the darker sides of Japanese culture, but we can’t wait to see how Doscher pulls it off.
