Summary
A film about being down in a hole feeling so small and out of control. A spin on the ‘buried alive’ genre that definitely doesn’t go where you expect it to.
Some of the best thrillers tap into our base fears. Taphophobia, or the fear of being buried alive, has been the subject of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Premature Burial through to Kill Bill and Buried. Similarly, Cleithrophobia – the fear of being trapped in confined spaces – has a rich dramatic history. While we’re not aware of any specific term for being stuck in a disused manhole, it does form the basis of Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s film.
Salaryman Shunsuke Kawamura (Yuto Nakajima) is one of the most respected and successful workers at his real estate firm. On the eve of his wedding, his co-workers throw him a surprise party. Sometime after the event, he inexplicably finds himself trapped at the bottom of a shaft connected to the titular manhole.
Shunsuke can’t reach the top, and a series of injuries and internal threats make his situation more desperate. Unable to convince his fiancée or the police of his plight, he turns to Twitter (or Pecker as it’s called here) to create a faux online persona of the ‘Manhole Girl.’ As a group of dedicate netizens attempt to find him, he soon realises he may not be in the hole by accident. In fact, there may be an enemy from his past out to get him.
If you’ve been to Japan, you’ll know that the ornate manholes dotting the various cities are Instagram favourites. So, one can only assume Michitaka Okada’s script, which combines both manholes and social media, is a knowing wink on some level. Yes, this might be one of those critical reaches, but you’ll have to forgive me. That’s because where this thing goes in the second half may leave you pondering whether you’ve stumbled into another film entirely.
The first act of the film is legitimately tense, the kind of thriller where audiences can immediately imagine ourselves in Shunsuke’s place and wonder what we would do in his situation. After all, there’s only so long we can watch him text people, rendered entirely as bubbles on screen.
So, when Okada’s screenplay necessarily adds in some new information in the back half of the film – a whopper of a nugget I won’t spoil for you here – it’s a double-edged sword. It pushes the narrative forward, but it fills the manhole with sharks and spends the rest of the film gleefully jumping over them. It’s an impressive feat for a film that’s stuck in a hole.
#MANHOLE (#マンホール) is a solid first draft concept that ultimately gets swallowed up by the feature-length format. The initial concept is too thin for a whole film, and it just sags under the weight of the additional and unlikely exposition. At the very least, it makes a convincing argument for keeping your phone battery charged at all times. Just remember that the next time you’re planning on being stuck in a hole.
2023 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri | WRITERS: Michitaka Okada | CAST: Yuto Nakajima, Nao, Kento Nagayama, Haru Kuroki | DISTRIBUTOR: New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF) | RUNNING TIME: 99 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 14-30 July 2023 (NYAFF)
