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Lionsgate has released the first trailer for Karōshi, an original near-future action thriller from writer-director Takashi Doscher and 87Eleven, the stunt-and-bruises outfit behind John Wick. It opens like the worst corporate away day ever filmed. Takehiro Hira, so good as the scheming Ishido in Shōgun, plays Vincent Ogawa, chief executive of the Ikigai Corporation, telling an adoring crowd how his company has shaped the modern world. Shortly afterwards one of his employees steps off the roof of the Manhattan headquarters and lands close enough to spatter Isabel May’s Jodie, an Ikigai true believer. The trailer helpfully defines the title for us: karōshi is Japanese for death from overwork. Ikigai, for the record, means something like “a reason for living”. Somebody in the branding department deserves a promotion, or possibly a long lie-down.
The setting is the hook. Doscher’s Manhattan sits in a parallel world where Japan became the global superpower and the West took up its currency and customs. At the trailer launch he explained that he started from the great Japanese corporations of the 1980s and imagined where they would be 40 or 50 years later. That’s a wonderfully retro premise. It’s the future cyberpunk promised us around 1984, when every paperback had its Chiba City, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner was papered with giant geisha adverts, and Back to the Future Part II had Marty McFly fired by fax by a boss called Fujitsu. Then the bubble burst, the Nikkei went on a very long holiday, and the future arrived from California in a hoodie instead. Karōshi has opted for the version with better tailoring.
The story is a revenge thriller dressed up as an induction day. Teo Yoo, the quietly devastating lead of Past Lives, plays Hiro, a new recruit who arrives after the worker’s death and, in the words of Lionsgate’s logline, exposes “the violent system hidden beneath its polished surface”. On screen that means the mild-mannered new starter fighting his way up the tower to the executive floors, blade in hand, and demanding that Ogawa tell the world the truth. Ikigai is said to follow the path of the samurai, and along the way the trailer shows more bodies falling past the windows, staff being choked out and a good deal of work with swords. The staff turnover would worry an HR department. TheWrap spotted shades of Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri, which is fair: that 1962 film is the great story of one man calmly taking apart an institution’s code of honour from the inside. The floor-by-floor climb towards the boss also suggests The Raid, or Game of Death with lanyards.
The supporting cast is strong: Cynthia Erivo, Giancarlo Esposito (who could play a menacing executive in his sleep, and quite possibly has), Bill Camp and Show Kasamatsu of Tokyo Vice. Lionsgate isn’t saying yet who most of them play. Doscher previously wrote and directed the 2019 post-apocalyptic drama Only, and he is also writing Chad Stahelski’s film of Ghost of Tsushima. He describes Karōshi as an anti-corporate corporate film, in the way that samurai pictures such as Yojimbo took the shine off the samurai myth they were selling. It was shot in Vancouver in the summer of 2025, with Pawel Pogorzelski, who lit Hereditary and Midsommar, behind the camera. So expect the deaths to be beautifully composed.
Karōshi reaches US cinemas on 5 February 2027, a week later than the 29 January date Lionsgate announced in June, and UK listings point to the same day. Here at SFcrowsnest we have a soft spot for any film that treats the corporate mission statement as a horror genre, though whether there’s more here than a very stylish body count remains to be seen. The release lands in early February, which is about when the new year’s resolution to stop answering work emails at midnight traditionally dies. Timing, as any samurai or line manager will tell you, is everything.
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