Article #7914

A commuter’s entrapment provides a taut, unnerving and rare example of an adaptation that holds close to the video game on which it is based

A glitch in the matrix, a rip in existence’s fragile fabric, and suddenly everything we knew about the world is snuffed out … or perhaps revealed to us for the first time. We see its arbitrariness, its cruelty, its vast indifference to the lab rats scurrying around frantically within it, heading for a death they cannot imagine. Genki Kawamura’s psychological mystery is inspired by the Japanese video game of the same name, and also by the repetitions of Groundhog Day and the vertiginous perspectives of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, with those corridors whose corners cannot be rounded without coming face-to-face with something horrible.

Kazunari Ninomiya plays a depressed young man on a crowded rush-hour Japanese subway train who one day sees a boorish commuter screaming at a young mother for not keeping her baby quiet. On alighting at the platform he takes a call from his ex-girlfriend – and that iPhone ringtone is very upsetting all by itself, guaranteed to have every audience member reflexively reaching for their own phone with guilty dread. She reveals that she is pregnant and something in the coincidence of these events unnerves the young man.