Man Down
Over-complicated. Under-thought. ‘#Manhole’ earns its place.
#manhole
Director: Kazuyoshi Kumakiri • Writer: Michitaka Okada
Starring: Yuto Nakajima, Nao, Kento Nagayama, Haru Kuroki
Japan • 1hr 40mins
Opens Hong Kong June 29 • IIB
Grade: C-
Filmmakers from every corner of the globe, have lost all grasp on that oldest of filmmaking adages: KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. The more universes and metaverses and sprawling conspiracies that get thrown up on screens the more it makes me (and I’m not alone on this) want to pull a Rocky Horror and chuck something at it out of sheer frustration. You know why we all went bonkers for John Wick? Because 1) some MF killed his dog and 2) buddy went to make them pay. The End. You know why we’re still watching Casablanca? Because 1) a dude’s old flame turns up at his bar with a new boyfriend and 2) he wrestles with whether or not to do right and get them both out of a war zone. The End. More story is not better story.
Which brings us to Kazuyoshi Kumakiri’s preposterous and overstuffed alleged thriller, #Manhole, a one-hander without the courage of its convictions to be an actual (largely) one-hander (Buried, Locke, Gerald’s Game, 127 Hours), about a Tokyo salaryman who falls down a, erm, well, manhole on the eve of his wedding. On the face of it the concept isn’t that bad, and with a more streamlined script it could be a ton of fun. But Michitaka Okada’s (who penned the Masquerade Hotel mysteries) reverse-engineered script is far, far, far from streamlined, and winds up just getting more, and more, and more irritating with each passing minute. It actively pissed me off.
No way that battery lasts
Don’t get me wrong. I love nothing better than some unhinged, batshit energy in a thriller. There’s nothing wrong with a touch of ludicrousness. But #Manhole goes above and beyond with its ludicrous. Look, it’s just hard to let go and believe an average mobile phone in constant use for creating new Twitter accounts and burning talk minutes – talk minutes! – will last an entire night and into the next day. Sorry, #Manhole, ya lost me.
The film also loses points for floating a bunch of ideas to explore and doing jack shit with them. When Shunsuke (ahem, Johnny & Associates, ahem, idol machine product Yuto Nakajima) falls into the manhole of the title and eventually strikes upon the idea of leveraging social media to get him out, he does so as Manhole Girl, knowing the knuckle-draggers on a Twitter-like platform will respond to a female faster. Trolling and name-calling shortly follow, but Kumakiri and Okada never really dive into the trial-by-tweet phenomena. No matter, I supposed, as the film then pivots into Shunsuke-as-dawg territory when he calls an old girlfriend, Mai (Nao), who initially tells him to get stuffed, then reluctantly helps him out. Somehow. Then there’s the typically over-cautious and nosy bureaucracy – the popo – Shunsuke reaches out to. Are we getting a modern Japanese gender relations story? A comment on the security state? No, and no. Then Okada starts laying on gratuitous twists that are about as obvious as they come.
The questions of “How did she…” and “When did he…” and “What the fuck…” come fast and furious when they really didn’t need to. Guy falls in a hole. All he has is a mobile phone: Go. That’s the perfect jumping off point for the compact, claustrophobic B thriller this wants to be but never evolves into. You know how we all roll our eyes when a story moves forward only because functioning adults don’t have a five-minute conversation? That’s all of #Manhole. It doesn’t help that no matter how hard anyone tries, Nakajima doesn’t exactly light up the screen. He’s got next to zero presence and less sex appeal. Putting the entire film on his modest shoulders was a poor casting choice. And yeah, Kumakiri does a decent job of mucking up his perfect cheekbones in the muddy, grimy hole, but it’s window dressing. The film wears out its welcome long before closing frames that inspire forehead slapping, not the oohs and aahs of revelation Kumakiri was aiming for. How this earned a spot at Berlin is beyond me. Bury this shit. — DEK