Few things in life are as nerve-wracking as being misunderstood. One moment, you're a regular man walking down the street; the next, your face is plastered across television screens, and strangers are whispering in convenience stores about your supposed crimes. To be seen incorrectly-mistaken, misread, misjudged-is one of the great universal human terrors. And yet, paradoxically, to be unseen, to vanish without a trace, is an equally unsettling fate.
Shoutai, or as Netflix has rebranded it with its characteristic flair for streamlining nuance, Faceless, lives in this contradiction. Even its title plays with the theme: shoutai in Japanese means "true identity," a phrase that suggests revelation, unmasking, the grand moment where the truth is finally exposed. But the film delights in the opposite-it is a story about a man who erases himself in order to survive, becoming less of a person and more of a rumor. In that sense, Netflix's choice of Faceless isn't entirely off the mark, though it trades the film's quiet existential riddle for the kind of title that sounds like it belongs to a Travolta/ Cage movie.
Its protagonist, Kaburagi (played by Ryusei Yokohama, a man who has perfected the art of looking both exhausted and deeply suspicious of his own reflection), is neither truly himself nor anyone else. He is a fugitive-not just from the police, but from the very idea of certainty. The question that lingers through the film is not just whether Kaburagi will be caught, but something far more unsettling: If a man's identity is determined by the way others see him, then what happens when the world decides to see him as someone else?
At its core, Shoutai is a film about the suffocating power of perception. Kaburagi's problem is not simply that he is accused of a crime, but that, once accused, his innocence becomes largely irrelevant. The truth does not matter as much as the narrative others have decided to impose upon him.
This is a predicament as ancient as civilization itself. History is filled with those who, through misunderstanding or malice, were cast in roles they never auditioned for. The witch who was never a witch. The heretic whose only crime was speaking a little too boldly. The stranger who "looked like someone" and never got the chance to correct the mistake. Kaburagi's crime is one of mistaken identity-but the real crime, as the film suggests, is how quickly the world embraces that mistake, as if eager to file him away in some grand cabinet of villains.
And yet, Shoutai is not simply a tragedy. It is, in its own grim way, a comedy-albeit the kind of comedy where you laugh quietly before nervously looking over your shoulder. The bureaucratic incompetence on display is almost impressive. The police, with their unshakable confidence in their own wrongness, pursue Kaburagi with the determination of a Roomba slamming repeatedly into a wall. They don't need him to be guilty-they just need him to be someone they can label and move on.
This, too, is familiar. The world, as it turns out, is astonishingly bad at distinguishing between reality and a well-constructed story. We do not have time to investigate every truth-we prefer our facts prepackaged, preferably in a 90-second news segment, a well-placed headline, or, if all else fails, a tweet. To be misunderstood, then, is not an unfortunate accident-it is an inevitability.
Kaburagi, for all his desperate maneuvering, learns what all fugitives-and, to some extent, all survivors-have always known: the trick is not to be invisible, but to be forgettable. True invisibility is impossible, but insignificance? That is an art.
As he moves through Japan, assuming new roles, slipping unnoticed into different lives, Shoutai reveals something quietly profound about human nature. People do not see what is in front of them; they see what they expect to see. The exhausted day laborer? Just another face in the crowd. The timid office worker? Nothing suspicious here. The man waiting alone at a train station? He must belong to someone, mustn't he?
The film invites us to ask how much of our own lives are shaped by this tendency. How often do we overlook the stranger beside us, the small irregularities in the stories we tell ourselves, the quiet gaps in the identities of those we claim to know? If a man can disappear simply by playing the right role, then how many others are already hiding in plain sight?
Despite its thriller premise, Shoutai refuses to indulge in the usual cat-and-mouse theatrics. There are no grand confrontations, no last-minute chases, no dramatic rooftop standoffs where a detective monologues about justice. Instead, the film operates in the quiet spaces between tension and resignation. It is not interested in proving whether Kaburagi is a criminal-it is far more fascinated by how quickly a person can be turned into one by public perception alone.
This makes the film both haunting and oddly meditative. It lingers on everyday moments-waiting at a bus stop, staring at a bowl of soup, sitting alone in a tiny apartment-until they become suffused with dread. Even the most mundane actions carry an undercurrent of paranoia, as if the very act of existing in public is a liability.
And yet, while the film flirts with the idea that Kaburagi could be anything-a hero, a villain, a tragic byproduct of mass hysteria-it ultimately does not leave the question unanswered. It does not hammer us over the head with it, but for those paying attention, the truth is there, waiting to be acknowledged.
Of course, whether the world acknowledges it-or prefers the simpler story-is another matter entirely.
