Last year I saw Fall, a dizzying thriller about a thrill seeker trapped at the top of a giant tower. Today's review is the complete inverse of that one; #Manhole, a Japanese one person disaster movie about a man who has fallen down a manhole. Directed by Kazuyoshi Kumakiri and written by Michitaka Okada, this seemed to be low on ideas, but turned out it was saving them all for the bonkers end.
Shensuke Kawamura (Yuto Nakajima) is a successful young salesman who is thrown a surprise party on the eve of his wedding to the daughter of the CEO of the company he works for. Him and his colleagues drink late into the night until eventually, a drunk Shensuke sets off for home. In the dark however he doesn't see an open manhole and promptly falls through the opening. Coming to, he realises that he sustained a nasty leg injury during the fall, and that even worse, the ladder leading out of the hole is broken. When he discovers that his phone's GPS appears to have been altered, so that he is unable to tell where he is, the man starts to suspect that this was all planned by someone out to cause him harm.
This avoids the usual plot device of the mobile phone being damaged or without signal and instead makes the phone a central part of the storytelling device. Being the middle of the night, Shensuke is unable to get through to any contacts on his phone, apart from awkwardly, a girl he had dated before he met his bride to be. He also gets through to the police, but due to his GPS not working they don't know how to locate the man. Much of the story for him comes through an in universe version of Twitter (Twitler?) called 'Pecker', on this social media platform he swiftly creates a profile named 'Manhole Girl', figuring people are more likely to assist him if they think he is a damsel in distress. It is via this platform that backstory for the type of person the protagonist is, is revealed to the viewer. The phone was an integral item, also being used to take photos that Shensuke hopes will identify where he is trapped, as well as for him to watch videos taken earlier in the evening, to look for clues on who may have spiked his drink (if he was indeed lured to the hole by someone sinister).
Make-up effects were effective, the protagonist getting more dirty and bloody as the one hour forty film goes on. The blood effects were good, and the manhole location was suitably gross. There always feels a need to have various unbelievable things happen to keep the movie interesting, and here is no different. Aside from his leg wound hindering his movement, other urgent matters randomly pop up, such as a gas pipe in the hole leaking gas, rain threatening to flood the hole, and waste from a slaughterhouse causing some type of foam to start filling up the space. These moments all felt a bit generic, this feeling not helped by the fact that Shensuke seems a bit of a self absorbed protagonist, thinking himself the most important person in the world.
By the end of the second act I felt like #Manhole may have ran out of energy, it became a bit meandering, and the dull location didn't do much to keep events exciting. Thankfully then, there is a third act that turns everything on its head. Flashbacks and revelations combine to make for story twists that I didn't remotely see coming. The film may end on a bit of a fun note, but it sure gets bleak along the way!
#Manhole started off fun enough but soon felt like it was running out of ideas. I was glad that there was a fresh injection of thrills added in that third act as it really turned things around for me, leading to a thrilling finale that was full of dark humour as well as misery! #Manhole streams exclusively on SCREAMBOX from February 25th.
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