Manhole opens with a dizzyingly edited sequence of a celebration party. It is the night before the protagonist, Shunsuke’s (Yuto Nakajima) wedding with the CEO’s daughter at the company where he works. His colleagues have gathered to celebrate the moment. Exiting the pub, a very tipsy Shunsuke is walking when he slips into a manhole. There is a broken ladder, which he attempts to scale but only exacerbates furthermore. His leg has sustained an injury. He can barely move around quickly. He thinks he is in Shibuya, which is what his GPS indicates. Soon, the veracity of the location is thrown into doubt.
Miraculously his phone is supercharged, and it is through it he tries to reach out for help. No one responds to his calls except his ex, Mai, with whom he had broken up five years ago before getting together with the CEO’s daughter. Initially, she injects him with guilt, hesitant to help. But decides to stick around, even guiding him to stitch his wounded leg with a stapler. However, things never pan out according to viewer expectations.
The screenplay by Michitaka Okada is particularly alert and wary of falling back on tropes of the survivalist genre. Hence, even if the narrative edges dangerously close to certain calcified notions, Okada always holds back and pulls out another trick. For the major chunk of the film, the action entirely unfolds in the cramped space, surrounded by a gradually escalating volume of foam from various openings.
A still from Manhole (2023)Frustrated by the tardiness of cops, Shunsuke creates a fake account on a Twitter-like platform, Pecker, through which he hopes aid can come quicker. The tactic seems to work momentarily, but things get out of hand. The sheer rabidness and vigilantism of the people flagging themselves as crusaders determined to help a poor girl, which Shunsuke is projecting himself as deepens the stakes in the narrative.
Tension is superbly mounted as the director, Kazuyoshi Kumakiri, meticulously builds every beat. The persuasiveness of the twists and turns differ in the strength of their conviction. Nevertheless, what is undeniable is how Kumakiri manages to keep the viewer sharply riveted to the proceedings.
This is a film that thrives on surprise, how little you know before stepping in, and persistently ratchets up the intrigue as Shunsuke keeps desperately seeking some sliver of hope and a way out of this hole. The filmmaker cleverly yokes the power of suggestion out of the sparest elements he has at his disposal in the minimal space of action.
While the foam is made to assert its threatening presence in our full view, nastier, gruesome things make an appearance, triggering mind-boggling epiphanies. There is also a refreshing amount of manipulation and deceit woven into Shunsuke’s characterization. He knows he has to orchestrate some wily game to secure an escape mediated by the online warriors. He keeps feeding them clues.
That the purported crusaders can take those clues as cues for their provocative games, wholly dismissing his plea, is what he hadn’t considered. Manhole is delicious and fresh in making its protagonist trapped in a survival mode being quite overtly manipulative and cunning as he devises his way out. It kept me on my toes, twisting my gut, as I started to feel apprehensive at the foam spreading and the possibility of worse horrors.
Okada and Nakajima keep us thoroughly invested in this unpredictable, often bizarrely extreme tale. It is a neat, sly, and confident thriller that, for the most part, retains its surprises with crispness and minimal fluff.
Manhole screened at the Fantasia Festival 2023.
Manhole (2023) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes
Manhole (2023) Movie Cast: Yûto Nakajima, Nao, Kento Nagayama
Manhole (2023) Movie Genre: Mystery & thriller, Runtime: 1h 39m
Where to watch Manhole
