There’s no way out when #Manhole drops exclusively on SCREAMBOX February 25. A groom-to-be turns to social media for help when he finds himself trapped in a manhole in the Japanese contained thriller.

It’s been a while since I saw a movie about people being trapped underground. Perhaps since I saw the movie appropriately titled Underground! I remember liking that movie well enough, so perhaps the genre of folks trapped beneath the surface is a winning formula.

Today’s review is of a new Japanese movie coming to Screambox for its American debut following its initial release in 2023. #Manhole tells the story of Shunsuke, a young man on the night before his wedding. He is invited out by his coworkers for an evening of drinking and celebrating. As the night ends, an inebriated Shun starts the walk home… when he apparently falls down!

When he wakes up, Shunsuke finds that he has tumbled down an open manhole. Having sustained a serious leg injury, he is desperate to find help when he realizes the ladder out has dilapidated far past the point of usefulness. Luckily, he still has his cell phone and what seems to be a very full battery.

Things start turning, though, when Shun finds reason to believe this was more than a night of drinking and stumbling home. Was he set up to take his fall?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Shunsuke falls into the manhole the night before his wedding day, creating immediate drama on multiple levels. Will he make it to his wedding? Will he even survive? There are different levels to care about here. You don’t have to go straight to worrying about Shunsuke’s life because there are other immediate stakes to be worried about.

In addition to that, we find out relatively early on that Shunsuke’s soon-to-be bride is also pregnant. There’s a MEDIUM level stress here now, too: will our protagonist see the birth of his child? I like all of these various levels of concern to be had here. So many times you see these single-location thrillers where a character is trapped and all we are supposed to care about is whether our hero will survive. Here, there is more going on. And that’s just the first act stuff…

+ #Manhole takes some WILD twists and turns you won’t see coming, and it is a pretty intense and interesting ride. Obviously, I don’t want to spoil anything here, but there were moments of my straightening up and saying “Wait, what?!” as I watched this flick.

We end up getting a movie that is about a lot more than what it seems to be at face value. There becomes an element of suspicion that someone actually set up Shunsuke’s down”fall”. Is something going on that is more than meets the eye? Shunsuke certainly ends up thinking so. But does that make it true?

– It’s probably a bit overlong at almost 100 minutes of runtime pre-credits. It could have stood to chop down some of the second act with Shunsuke in the manhole with the foam. Even with all of the added elements that I talked about in the second Up, there just ends up being a fair amount of movie to #Manhole, and it could have been edited down some.

I just mentioned a particular scene in the second act where the manhole starts filling up with a disgusting foam that threatens to drown Shunsuke (can you drown in foam, I wondered), and if I had my way, I’d have cut all of that segment. It just feels like added drama. And even if you keep that element, I’d have cut some of the phone calls that Shun has to make. There’s just about ten to fifteen minutes too much here overall, regardless of what the editor could/should have decided to lose.

– You spend a lot of the movie wondering what Shunsuke’s idea to get out of his own mess is when the angry horde he stirs up realizes he is not a beautiful girl. The movie pays all of this off in the third act, but it still makes you wonder what he was thinking. He has to suppose that when some white knight shows up to save him that they might leave him to his fate when they get there.

Also, it’s strange that the stirred up mob are able to dig up so many details of Shun’s life, but not what should be one of the easiest details to discover, the one that would unravel all of Shunsuke’s plans. But it never happens because the movie doesn’t want it to. So we just take it at face value and go along, I guess.

OVERALL

#Manhole starts off with a very “been there, done that” premise, but it gets progressively more interesting as it goes on. Storywise, it’s an engaging ride. I’d argue nothing about the movie is extraordinarily well-done on a level we haven’t seen before; the framing and direction is fine, and the audio quality is adequate. So while it’s competently made, nothing about the production value lifts the movie particularly high. It’s just a fun story and a good movie.