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Adulthood is often compared to a treadmill for the way the daily grind of responsibilities and obligations manufactures the illusion of forward progress, keeping us running after goals that remain out of reach until we collapse in the same place we started.
But what if life is actually more like an inescapable underground station, where every corridor looks identical and the walls occasionally drip blood and produce hallucinations of crying babies and mutated rats? That’s where director Genki Kawamura takes us with his video-game adaptation. Same difference, maybe, but a much more useable concept for a horror movie.
A sparse, small-scale mindbender, Exit 8 is based on the viral video game of the same name and, for the first few minutes, plays like it. An unnamed young man (Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya) rides a cramped subway train to his temp job in Tokyo. As he disembarks, he receives a phone call from his ex-girlfriend. She’s pregnant. In his disorientation at the news, it takes him a moment to realise he’s walking in circles – down the same white-tiled hallway, past the same robotic NPC carrying a briefcase.
All that tablesetting is presented in a single, unbroken POV shot; once the protagonist recognises that something is amiss, the perspective changes, and that’s when the game, for him, truly begins. A helpful placard explains the rules: ‘If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back.’
The goal, of course, is to escape the maze by identifying patterns, which, on its face, doesn’t sound like thrilling material for a movie. But Kawamura (A Hundred Flowers) advances the game’s threadbare plotting into an effective, if sometimes heavy-handed, metaphor for breaking the unchanging infinity-loop of one’s own life.
The movie is more of an anxiety dream than a full-fledged nightmare
Ninomiya’s character isn’t developed much beyond the opening scene, but that’s all the information that’s really needed: he’s a twentysomething acting like an ageing salaryman, content to shove in earbuds, stare at his phone and ride the train to nowhere every day. Suddenly faced with a life-altering situation, he’s plunged into a form of cosmic purgatory not dissimilar to the time trap in Groundhog Day – the universe’s way of smacking someone out of their patterns of behaviour. (Two other characters are eventually introduced, though it’s unclear if they’re traped with him or within him.)
The movie is more of an anxiety dream than a full-fledged nightmare, and the more typically unsettling imagery – the aforementioned blood and rats, a man’s face contorting into an unnatural grin – feel perfunctory. But the over-lit, blindingly sterile production design is effectively claustrophobic. In exploring the unease of infinite liminal spaces, Exit 8 should make a natural companion film to A24’s equally extradimensional horror Backrooms. Bring on the double feature – preferably in a blank-walled screening room.
Exit 8 is in US theaters Apr 10. Out in US and Ireland cinemas Apr 24.