Review: Exit 8 – “Wonderfully disturbing and creepy in places.”

Directed by Genki Kawamura
Starring Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma, Kotone Hanase

I’ve been looking forward to seeing Exit 8, having been unable to make it to the cinema release, and having heard a lot of good things about this – gasp! A good video game to film adaptation! I was not disappointed.

As with the Kotake Create game, the bulk of the movie is confined to one location, following the perspective of The Lost Man, Kazunari Ninomiya. We start with him on a typically crowded underground train, where he pauses listening to his headphones to look up and see a rude, aggressive Salaryman type angrily berating a young mother because he baby is screaming. Like the other commuters around him, he looks, is not impressed by the bad behaviour, but does nothing to intervene.

When he alights on his platform and starts to walk to the titular Exit 8, his phone rings. His ex-girlfriend is calling, and she has news – she is in the hospital, and she is pregnant. Our Lost Man is unsure how to react to this, but it feels very much like he is reluctant to be a part of this situation, and looking for a way out of it (the irony, given the situation he will soon find himself in). As he walks into the sterile, shiny tiled corridors towards the exit, the phone signal breaks up and then is gone. He continues walking, taking the turns, then the long straight passages, then the turns again…

…And this is where it goes from a normal, if cold, public space to a more liminal one, then to downright disturbing. He takes a corner, walks past a row of lockers, a pile of sheets dumped next to them, and a photo booth, then another sharp turn into the longer, white, tiled corridor, and another man, known as The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), in his business shirt and tie, attaché case and phone, striding down the corridor towards him and past him, but seemingly utterly oblivious to The Lost Man. He continues, turns another sharp corner, and finds himself passing identical lockers, sheets and photo booth, turns the next corridor feeling an uneasy sense of deja vu, and yes, this corridor also looks the same, but then so do most in such places.

Except around the corner, he hears footsteps, and it is the same Walking Man coming around the corner and then walking past him again. Now, The Lost Man is getting worried, grabbing his asthma inhaler from his bag as he starts to panic a bit. He tries to keep going, but he can’t – he is in a loop, like something from an Escher print crossed with Groundhog Day. In fact, among the advertising posters on a wall he passes, is one for an Escher exhibition, featuring ants trapped in a Möbius loop, the shape imitating the “8” of the eponymous Exit he is searching for.

He finds instructions on one wall, which he struggles to understand at first – it tells him to keep walking forward, unless he spots an anomaly, in which case he should go backwards. Unsure what this means, he starts walking again, pondering their meaning. When he encounters the Walking Man again, they pass as usual, without any acknowledgement. But then he hears his footsteps stop suddenly, so he turns slowly and the Walking Man is standing stock-still behind him, a creepy grin on his face. Somewhat freaked out, he realises this is some kind of anomaly and retreats. He notices another sign, where the number changes each time he passes, from a zero to a one and on, if he completes a stage correctly, indicating how many times he must succeed to reach Exit 8. This simple sign becomes quite an emotional touchstone, and you really feel the desperation or elation when he passes by it again and finds it has gone down or up.

The anomalies start small, but soon start to become more disturbing. We also start to get a handful of other perspectives – we see a little from the perspective of The Walking Man, a small boy (Naru Asanuma) and a young high school girl (Kotone Hanase), which adds a much-needed, but carefully rationed element of interaction and alternative views of what is happening in this strange space. We also start to find that some of the phenomena they think are new anomalies – in fact, it may be that some of them are some sort of life-lesson, but how to understand which is which is not always obvious (until passing the number sign and seeing if it has gone up or reset itself). It also breaks the repetitive corridors a little for some flashbacks, or possibly flash-forwards, hinting that his moral choices as well as his ability to spot anomalies, may play an important part in any escape.

This is a compact, atmospheric, clever piece of work, slowly taking its time to build the sense of unease from boring, everyday location to the feeling something isn’t right, to downright disturbing, and many of us will empathise because we too have experienced the way these liminal spaces that seem so ordinary most of the time, can start to feeling different, say late night when almost nobody else is there, and it plays on this beautifully. I watched this the same week I got to see the much-acclaimed Backrooms film, and I thought that superb too, although I think Exit 8 is slightly superior, largely because it feels like whatever force puts each person into this loop is doing so not out of malice, but partly to try and impart a personal lesson in their lives too, and that adds another level to it.

Wonderfully disturbing and creepy in places, but taking its time to build that sensation up, we really start to become immersed, walking those same repeating corridors with our protagonist, seeing much of it from his perspective, feeling what he feels, that mounting sense of frustration that then becomes desperation as he realises he is not merely lost, not taken a wrong corridor, he is stuck in something unnatural. The endlessly repeating cold, white tiled corridors could easily have been boring after a few scenes, but the camera work keeps it fresh, and you find yourself looking with the Lost Man for anomalies, for the tiny differences – was that door handle always in the same place? – as you are all but walking around with him. Exit 8 sits well among films like Backrooms, Groundhog Day or River. Highly recommended.

Exit 8 makes its digital platforms debut from Monday 8th of June, and will be available on Blu-Ray from 29th June.