Michi Kudo, newly moved to
Tokyo, works at a plant shop with Junko Sasano, Toshio Yabe, and Taguchi, who has been missing for several days while working on a computer disk for the shop's sales. Michi goes to Taguchi's apartment and finds him distracted and aloof; while looking for the disk, she turns and finds he has hanged himself, his decaying body making her question who she had spoken to earlier. The disk reveals an
endless loop of images of Taguchi staring into his monitor, while a ghostly face appears on another screen. Yabe receives a distorted phone call saying "help me" and sees the same image from Taguchi's disk on his phone. At Taguchi's apartment, he finds a black stain on the wall where Taguchi hanged himself, as well as a printed note reading "a forbidden room." Outside the apartment, he notices a door sealed with red tape and enters, encountering a ghost. Yabe disappears for a few days before returning to work, acting distant and strange. He warns Michi not to enter "the forbidden room." Soon after, Michi's boss also goes missing, and she receives a call at work with Yabe's voice repeating "help me." Looking for him in the shop's storage room, she instead finds a stain on the wall, similar to the one in Taguchi's apartment. Junko, searching for their boss, enters a "forbidden room" in the building. Michi pulls Junko away from a ghost, but the encounter leaves Junko in a catatonic state. Later, in Michi's apartment, Junko walks towards a wall, dissolving into a black stain that scatters. Worried, Michi leaves Tokyo to check on her mother when her calls go unanswered. Simultaneously, Ryosuke Kawashima, a university economics student, has recently signed to a new
internet service provider. His computer accesses a website by itself, displaying disturbing images of people alone in dark rooms. That night, Ryosuke wakes to find his computer on again, showing the same images, and frantically unplugs it. The next day, he visits the university computer lab and meets Harue Karasawa, a postgraduate computer science student, who suggests
bookmarking the page or
screenshotting the images for her to examine. Ryosuke attempts to do so, but his computer does not follow his commands, instead playing a video of a man with a plastic bag over his head, sitting in a room with "help me" written all over the walls. A graduate student tells Ryosuke his theory that the dead are invading the physical world. Harue starts behaving strangely, believing that ghosts are trying to trap the living in their loneliness rather than kill them. Ryosuke tries to escape with her by train, but it stops, and Harue returns to her apartment. She witnesses the man with the plastic bag shoot himself on her computer screen before it cuts to a live video of herself. As she embraces the invisible figure watching her, Harue, who has always felt lonely, happily says that she is "not alone". When Ryosuke arrives, she has disappeared. The ghosts launch a full-scale invasion of the
Kantō region, resulting in the disappearances of people en masse, and an evacuation of Tokyo commences. Ryosuke meets Michi while looking for Harue, and the two find her in an abandoned factory. Mimicking the man she saw on her computer, Harue removes a plastic bag from her head and shoots herself. When Ryosuke and Michi's car runs out of gas, Ryosuke searches a warehouse for fuel and inadvertently enters a "forbidden room", where a ghost tells him that "death is eternal loneliness." Although he initially resists the ghost's influence, Ryosuke loses the will to live, and Michi pulls him to safety. They drive through Tokyo, now completely abandoned, and witness numerous apocalyptic sights. After reaching
Tokyo Bay and attempting to leave the city by motorboat, they are rescued by a ship crewed by survivors, who reveal that the same events are happening worldwide. As the ship sets off for
Latin America, the captain reassures Michi that she was right to continue living. She returns to her room and finds Ryosuke sitting against the wall with his eyes closed. He fades into a stain on the wall as Michi reflects on finding happiness in being alone with her last friend in the world. ==Cast==