‘Exit 8’ review: Tokyo’s subway is an endless purgatory in ‘ingenious’ video game adaptation

Dir. Genki Kawamura. Japan 2025. 95mins

The theme music to Genki Kawamura’s conceptual chiller Exit 8 is Ravel’s Bolero, however it may simply have kicked off with Bob Dylan singing, “There should be a way out of right here…” Based mostly on an influential online game of the identical title, Exit 8 performs like a nightmare model of the basic Seinfeld episode about making an attempt to flee from an underground automobile park – besides that right here the situation is a Tokyo subway station and a seemingly limitless passageway that more and more involves resemble purgatory, or the twists of the human thoughts itself.

A uncommon game-based film that really has the texture of a sport

Director and established novelist Kawamura performed comparable visible and temporal video games to evoke the expertise of old-age dementia in his 2022 drama A Hundred Flowers. In Exit 8, he makes use of such gadgets for a really totally different function. This ingenious mind-twister defies the IP’s built-in repetition to ingenious and entertaining, if generally mechanical impact – with echoes of high-concept movies like Vicenzo Natali’s Dice and a extra radically freaky Japanese entrapment oddity, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s 2009 Image. A uncommon game-based film that really has the texture of a sport, with confoundingly difficult guidelines, Exit 8 ought to obtain stable cult standing past Japan.

The movie’s anonymous protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) is travelling to work on the Tokyo subway amid a crowd of commuters, all misplaced of their telephones – aside from one stressed-out man who rages on the mom of a crying child. Ignoring this, he disembarks and takes a name from his ex – she offers him some probably life-changing information, which he’s manifestly not but able to deal with. This sequence, executed in a protracted POV take, or a intelligent simulation thereof, units up the drama through which the hero, recognized in a caption because the ‘Misplaced Man’, is unable to get out of a zigzagging hall that supposedly results in an elusive Exit 8.

There’s no-one else round, besides an older man who retains robotically striding previous him (the so-called ‘Strolling Man’, performed by Yamato Kochi). A noticeboard proclaims a algorithm for escaping: be careful for ‘anomalies’ and miss them at your peril. However as different figures seem on this sealed-in world, the Misplaced Man has to find out whether or not they’re fellow hapless wanderers, or themselves anomalies.

The Misplaced Man walks on, generally turning again, his long-take progress cleverly edited to make the brightly-lit tiled passageway appear limitless whereas the digital camera circles spherical him, enhancing the sense of disorientation. The movie performs cannily on the suspenseful sense of repetition – we’re continually hoping, and fearing, to search out one thing new and important round every nook. Simply because it appears the movie has nowhere to go, Kawamura takes a bracingly sudden detour, with extra to comply with.

There’s no logical clarification for what’s taking place, though one determine turns as much as provide speculative interpretations – however the movie step by step, if not altogether gracefully, makes it clear that our hero’s travails are very a lot certain up with the present state of his life, and with an moral transgression that has sparked his entire journey. The drama’s underlying theme of social and private conscience clearly lifts Exit 8 past the extra mechanical facets of its gaming origins, though Kawamura doesn’t fairly deal with it and not using a sure mawkishness.

At their finest, the twists adroitly wrongfoot the viewers, and the characters too, though there’s one grotesque leap scare-laden part that comes as an jarring deviation. In any other case, allusions to The Shining, each in imagery and in Kubrick-style compositions, in addition to to the Moebius-strip artwork of M.C. Escher, give the movie a genuinely unsettling coherence. Ryo Sugimoto’s manufacturing design brings a dream dimension to what ostensibly appears a secular on a regular basis setting. The performing additionally offers a believable human issue, with Ninomiya veering between desperation and composed dedication, and Kochi contributing an eccentric and unpredictable presence.