#Manhole Review: Into the Deep of the Self

From 127 Hours to Thirteen Lives, the world loves a story about guys stuck in holes. As told by Hollywood, these stories are often about triumph over adversity—manifestos for the credo that determination and grit can allow one to survive the antagonism of nature. #Manhole is director Kumakiri Kazuyoshi’s more caustic though no less melodramatic take on the human psyche being subjected to the intolerable anxiety of a hole-centric crisis. Here, the abyss leads directly inward, confronting its central character with the grime of his soul.

After drunkenly stumbling away from a surprise office wedding shower thrown for him by his co-workers, Shunsuke (Nakajima Yuto) steps directly into an uncovered manhole. When he comes to, this young twentysomething professional finds that he’s landed on relatively soft soil. But during his unconscious plummet he gashed his leg open on the broken ladder leading down the manhole—a means of egress that makes it even more difficult for him to escape.

Luckily, as virtually everyone would, Shunsuke has his smartphone with him (and unlike a lot of us, his seems to be fully charged at the end of a night out). #Manhole doesn’t try to put to rest doubts about its premise—namely, that getting stuck in an urban manhole seems impossible in the age of digital ubiquity. Rather, it turns this into the fulcrum of its drama. Unable to lead either the cops or Mai (Nao), an ex-girlfriend who happens to pick up her phone at one point, to his location, Shunsuke opens a social media account under the handle “Manhole Girl.”

The problem is that the GPS locator on his phone turns out to be inaccurate because, somehow, he’s somewhere quite a distance away from the blue dot in his maps app. Exploiting the internet’s inclination to turn cute girls in distress into a casus belli of viral proportions, Shunsuke decide to catfish the hive mind in order to elicit its help in tracking him down. Soon an army of eccentric very-online dudes are scouring through what little information “Manhole Girl” can derive from the grimy, wet, dead-rat-infested burrow that “she” has found herself in.

From this point, potential intimations that Shunsuke has slipped through some kind of time-space rift give way to the clear allegorical bent of Okada Michitaka’s screenplay. Here we have a man in a dingy hole typing furiously away on his phone, buying into the conspiracy theories proposed by his would-be rescuers, and agitating furiously (and mendaciously) for someone to save his victimized female alter-ego. Perhaps inevitably, the familiar question posed by the drama is whether smartphones are more of a lifeline or a noose.

#Manhole’s very conceit pushes it toward comedy; the film even observes the classic “rule of threes” in relation to the hobbled Shunsuke’s attempts to ascend the dilapidated ladder. But Kumakiri counters the comic absurdity with a genuinely discomfiting sense of the manhole’s atmosphere, and threads of intrigue that are already mostly spun by the time you see them.

These threads lead to the revelation of what’s lurking beneath Shunsuke’s confusing and hellish predicament. In the process, #Manhole ultimately reveals itself as a rather conventional melodrama of buried secrets and hidden crimes. But while the way it twists our expectations and reverses our sympathies fits well into a well-known pattern from cinema, #Manhole also feels familiar for another reason. The swing from hero to villain, from righteous dunker to pathetic dunkee, slyly acknowledges what’s par for the melodramatic course in the Twitterspere.