The redundancy and repetition of required routines have long been the bogeymen of modern life. Exit 8 makes Kafkaesque nightmares literal, with the added twist of tying one’s eternal fate to an exceptionally challenging game of “spot the difference.” Turns out that Highlights for Kids magazines were actually missives from hell.
Based on a Japanese indie video game, writer/director Genki Kawamura’s film is the latest horror-adjacent flick to leverage liminal spaces as a spooky threat. Cowritten by Kentaro Hirase, Exit 8 features nameless characters, delightfully upsetting audio cues, and the most run-walking you’ve seen since the internet killed shopping malls. Although by no means groundbreaking or transcendent, it splits the arrow already lodged in the dead center of the bullseye at which it aimed.
What passes for our hero is a figure known only as Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya). He finds out that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant right as he loses cell service in the subway on his way to a temp job. She was asking him if she should keep the baby, which feels like a decidedly IRL question. He promises that he’ll head over to the hospital to see her but can’t quite seem to figure out the hallway system…
He keeps rounding the same corner, coming back to a sign that says he is on level 0. The information next to the sign says that he should proceed forward until he sees an anomaly. If he does, he must turn around. If he doesn’t, he ought to keep going. If he gets it right, he goes up a level. If he gets it wrong, back to 0. Reaching the exit, as you may have inferred, will take 8 correct run throughs.
Along the way he meets Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who sometimes gives him a horribly creepy smile. He also meets The Boy (Naru Asanuma), who seems to have a connection to Lost Man that can only be figured out by everyone immediately. Around and around and around our protagonist goes, suffering through what is either an MC Escher drawing commissioned by Satan or a vision of purgatory vomited up by capitalism.
The metaphors are explicit, and the meaning is directly spoken. A high-school student (Kotone Hanase) pops up to literally articulate the theories as to what is happening. The question isn’t whether Lost Man can pay close enough attention to solve the puzzle but whether he can look beyond the monotonous torture and reform his very self.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is the question in front of us, isn’t it? As we collectively face the same horrors on repeat, are we capable of becoming better? Can we look beyond our own needs and desires? The only way to escape our grotesque rat race is to change.
Exit 8 is brisk and decidedly unpresumptuous, going so far as to nobly refuse to wallow in endless jump scares, which it easily could have. You will remember it while shuffling through airports, while following the same morning patterns on the way to work, while doomscrolling. Less of a masterpiece and more of a mirror, it is the best kind of mildly upsetting.
Grade = A-
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Justin Chang at The New Yorker says “To reject any anomaly, anything mysterious or unusual, Kawamura suggests, is to succumb to a soul-crushing, self-serving conformity—and to withhold possibilities of decency, discovery, and love that make any game worth playing, life very much included.”
Sharai Bohannon at Horror Press says “Horror is political, and this game has so many things that could have been expanded on. The insertion of an anti-choice layer into a film centered on three male characters (at three very different stages of life) is wild. I personally hated it because, aside from that, it does capture the vibes of the game.”
Tina Kakadelis at Beyond the Cinerama Dome says “There is not a lot of meat on the bones of Exit 8. The anomalies are easy to spot, the emotional weight is too hollow, and the setting isn’t claustrophobic enough. What made the game, and ones like it (Papers, Please comes to mind), is its tense, unsettling environment, and the failure of attention to detail when put under the microscope.”