The Violence of Silence

Dear wanderer,

Moderato — Choice or Coercion

When you are all alone, when your phone is silent, when everyone has forgotten about you, there comes a point where your existence seems meaningless. The loneliness is cruel.

In the quiet corridors of Plan 75, freedom arrives not as a gift but as a signature at the bottom of a form. The State presents it gently, almost tenderly, as though offering a new kind of mercy. “Here,” it seems to say, “you are not abandoned, you are in control.” Yet beneath this veil of autonomy lies a crueler truth: when poverty has emptied your pockets, when children no longer call, when friends are buried and your own body betrays you, is it still a choice to step toward death? Or is it merely surrender dressed as dignity?

Choice, after all, presumes alternatives. Yet what alternatives remain for the elderly characters in this story? A small apartment where silence grows heavier than sleep. A factory job that no longer welcomes their trembling hands. A society that praises youth, efficiency, and speed but finds no place for those who move too slowly. Plan 75 gives them an option, yes, but it is an option born of abandonment. And so, the film asks us: what does freedom mean in a world where the vulnerable are stripped of genuine possibilities?

The cruelty lies not in the offer itself but in the absence of every other offer. If you are 75, living alone, without family or support, the “freedom to die” begins to resemble a cornered animal’s leap into the abyss. And so the question becomes sharper: who, in truth, is making the choice? The individual, or the society that has quietly sculpted the walls around them?

What makes Plan 75 devastating is that it does not shout. It whispers. It offers instead of commands. It dresses the trap in velvet and calls it liberation. And the characters, weary from years of invisibility, find themselves taking the pen in hand not out of rebellion, but out of exhaustion.

Adagio — The Violence of Silence

There are no screams in Plan 75. No blows, no blood, no tyrant shouting orders. Only impersonal offices, soft voices on the phone, employees smiling like salespeople selling mobile contracts. They speak of choice, of dignity, of service. But behind those words hides a colder machinery: a society shedding its “useless weights” without ever raising a hand, without ever raising its voice.

This violence does not explode, it seeps in. It hides inside ordinary gestures. It takes the shape of forms, plastic cards, glossy brochures. It dresses itself as benevolence, it presents itself as a public service, a new conquest of humanity. But with every polite smile, a human life is reduced to a statistic.

The most chilling part is the banality of the process. There is no murderer, no aggressor. Only procedures. A phone call, a signature, a date scheduled like a medical appointment. Dying becomes an ordinary transaction, another operation in the vast social machinery.

The viewer realizes then that violence is not always visible. It is not measured in the volume of a scream but in the coldness of silence. In Plan 75, death is not imposed: it is encouraged, normalized, presented as reasonable. And that is the horror: the system does not coerce, it persuades. That makes the disappearance even more terrible.

In this world where everything appears polite and functional, solitude becomes indistinguishable from death long before the body stops breathing. Lives are erased without noise, and erasure is mistaken for compassion.

Allegro — Hope as Quiet Rebellion

And yet, even inside this perfect machine of oblivion, life finds its cracks. Not with loud cries or revolutions, but with small gestures that stubbornly resist. An unexpected conversation in a corridor. A touch that breaks anonymity. A memory resurfacing, like a photograph rescued from water.

These moments do not erase the shadow of the system, but they fracture it. They are brief, fragile, almost invisible, and yet they exist as a counterpoint. In a society that suggests disappearance, every gesture of tenderness becomes a political act, a small sabotage against the logic of efficiency.

Plan 75 shows us that hope does not need to be loud to survive. It is a whisper moving through the folds of silence. It is the choice to walk one more day, to smile when nothing justifies it, to tell a story no one has asked for. It is a fragile but real rebellion, manifesting when a character decides, even for a moment, to say: “Not yet. Not like this.”

In these cracks, the human returns. Not as a triumphant victory, but as stubborn resistance. Because living, in a world that suggests vanishing, becomes already an act of courage. A silent but undeniable declaration: life, however heavy, remains worthy.

Presto — Coda

Alone.
Silent room.
Form on the desk.
Is this choice,
or a push
to leave?

❓ And you, wanderer — if the silence closed in around you, would you still choose to stay?

De l’errant à l’errant,

Orlando.