Seventeen-year-old Shiori Maezawa’s quiet life fractures when a humiliating social media post shatters more than her phone screen — it splinters her identity. Labyrinth, directed by Shōji Kawamori, folds teenage insecurity, idol culture and smartphone anxieties into a surreal tale where an anxious version of Shiori is trapped in a dark, digital underworld while an idealized, outgoing doppelganger takes over her real life. The film premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival on October 28 and later screened at Scotland Loves Anime on November 2, 2025, making it a modern, festival-oriented experiment in tech-age body horror and pop spectacle.
Labyrinth poster — director Shōji Kawamori’s smartphone-age fable.
Table of Contents
Plot overview: fractured identity and a smartphone-induced nightmare
At its core, Labyrinth follows Anxious Shiori as jealousy and betrayal push her toward a literal fracture of self. After her best friend Kirara posts a humiliating clip online, Shiori’s hidden persona splinters: one self becomes trapped in an empty, liminal digital realm populated by transformed souls, while the other blossoms into an ambitious, camera-ready sensation aiming to rack up millions of likes. The film alternates between these two realities — the eerie, Silent Hill-esque labyrinth inside the phone and the gaudy, idol-driven real world — exploring what it costs to perform for an audience of strangers.
Themes and social critique
Social media as identity pressure cooker
Labyrinth leans heavily into the idea that modern connectivity demands constant performance. The film literalizes the psychology of online life: people become flat stickers or emoticons, reduced to curated expressions that fit a feed. Kawamori uses this metaphor to critique how anonymity and parasocial metrics (likes, shares, follower counts) can hollow out personality and encourage dangerous split personas.
Jealousy, friendship and the curated self
Shiori’s conflict is both personal and cultural: she envies Kirara’s effortless charisma while pouring her true feelings into an anonymous account. That secret coping mechanism — hiding behind stickers and curated content — becomes her undoing, and the film asks whether modern youth can maintain authentic relationships when digital currency undervalues emotional honesty.
Visuals and animation: bold ideas, mixed execution
Visually, Labyrinth offers striking moments. The digital underworld is rich with industrial imagery: gigantic presses flatten three-dimensional beings into two-dimensional stickers while red text pours like blood — a memorable metaphor for how digital systems can crush individuality. However, the film’s choice to render characters entirely in 3D CG undermines emotional nuance at times. The animation can feel doll-like; the physical exaggeration and squash-and-stretch dynamics of traditional 2D animation are largely absent, which reduces some scenes’ visceral impact.
Characters and performances
Shiori functions as the audience proxy, but her anxious version is intentionally muted and inward-facing, which makes sustained engagement challenging. Her idealized counterpart — loud, confident, and almost vampiric in charisma — is far more entertaining and deliberately so. Supporting figures like Komori, a sad pink-bunny sticker guide, supply comic relief and pathos; his design and comic helplessness are some of the film’s few consistently effective touches. The antagonist, Suguru Kagami, operates as a caricature of predatory media moguls: his ultimate scheme to free everyone’s “ideal selves” reads as both grandiose and unclear, leaving his motivations somewhat undercooked.
Tone, pacing and audience reaction
Labyrinth oscillates between earnest tension and accidental comedy. Many audiences — especially at festival screenings — reacted with stunned laughter at some of the film’s stranger tonal choices. Scenes that appear intended to be dramatic sometimes land as bizarre or unintentionally comic, creating a viewing experience that can feel uneven. The nearly two-hour runtime exacerbates pacing issues; the film occasionally lingers on ideas without fully developing them, producing a sensation of a bloated but energetic experiment.
Why Labyrinth divides viewers
There’s a clear split between viewers who admire the film’s audacity and those who are frustrated by its incoherence. If you appreciate surreal, idea-driven cinema packed with provocative visual metaphors and don’t mind narrative leaps, Labyrinth offers an intriguing — if messy — ride. If you prefer tightly plotted character arcs and animation that sells emotional realism, you may find the film unsatisfying. The mixture of pop-idol aesthetics, body-horror metaphors and slapstick flourishes makes for an uneven blend that’s entertaining in short bursts but rarely cohesive as a whole.
Where Labyrinth lands in Kawamori’s filmography
Shōji Kawamori is best known for sprawling, genre-mixing projects, and Labyrinth continues that tendency by attempting to combine mecha-like production design, idol culture and psychological horror. Unlike Kawamori’s most iconic works, which often balance spectacle and human drama with surgical clarity, Labyrinth prioritizes concept over polish. That choice yields fascinating imagery and moments of genuine invention, but also a sense that too many ideas were strung together without a firm guiding logic.
Further reading
For readers curious about the festival context and screenings, see the Tokyo International Film Festival and Scotland Loves Anime festival pages for program notes and screening information. Tokyo International Film Festival and Scotland Loves Anime provide schedules and festival write-ups.
Final thoughts
Labyrinth is a polarizing, sometimes infuriating, and occasionally brilliant meditation on identity in the smartphone era. Its strongest moments are vivid metaphors about digital flattening and the cost of performing for a global audience, but inconsistent tone, clumsy narrative choices and an overly doll-like CG aesthetic limit its emotional resonance. If you’re prepared for a quirky, off-kilter experience that favors concept and spectacle over clean storytelling, Labyrinth offers plenty of “What am I even watching?” moments to savor. If you want clarity and cohesive character work, approach with caution — but don’t be surprised if some scenes linger in your mind long after the credits roll.
