You just can’t turn around these days without tripping over someone adapting a horror video game.
At least, that’s what it feels like – between Five Nights at Freddy’s, Iron Lung, The Last of Us, and Silent Hill 2 (though the less said on that, the better), there have been a glut of horror game adaptations in the last couple of years that doesn’t seem to be slowing down. And Exit 8, adapted from the 2023 game of the same name from Kotake Create, is one of the tougher sells when it comes to adaptation – functionally a walking simulator that has the player loop around the same subway platform trying to identify anomalies on each rotation, the naturally-repetitive gameplay seemed like a hell of an ask to bring to the screen in a way that wasn’t utterly, well, boring.
Which is why I have to give so much credit to writer-director Genki Kawamura, who not only managed to pull of an adaptation of Exit 8, but to create a distinct and genuinely engrossing film that feels true to the game’s approach. The film follows an unnamed protagonist (Ninomiya Kazunari) as he is trapped in a looping subway corridor after receiving momentous personal news, encountering several other strange characters, including a little boy and a man (Yamato Kochi) who appears to be stuck in the same loop as the lead.
The game version of Exit 8 has been compared to P.T., a now-erased playable teaser for Guillermo Del Toro’s Silent Hills game, and there is more than a sniff of Silent Hill about Exit 8 now it has made it to the big screen. That sense of being trapped in this strange, unknowable space with rules that don’t seem to make any sense, navigating some enormous personal issue through the lens of whatever this place puts in front of you, is captured beautifully in the slightly-liminal loop of the subway corridors. The performances, especially from Kazunari and Kochi, help create compelling protagonists for the film’s chapters, even with the scant-to-nonexistent backstory we get on any of them.
The horror is reticent, for the most part, more about what’s lurking just out of sight than what the movie lays out before you – aside from a few really cool creature designs, the dread comes from the scanning of the surroundings, trying to work out what, if anything, is different this time around. In fact, that banality makes up some of the very real horror at the story’s heart – that the hell of a life with no texture is what waits for our lead if he does not find a way to break the loop. You as the viewer find yourself in much the same position as our unnamed protagonist, an effective approach that keeps the inherent monotony of the story from becoming too much of a trudge.
But what Kawamura does to really elevate this story is to weave in a simple but elegant thematic throughline about fatherhood. The three primary characters who appear in the subway corridor – the protagonist, the businessman, and the boy – seem to represent our lead’s anxieties about the revelation that his ex-girlfriend has fallen pregnant, and whether he is capable of stepping up to the plate in a meaningful way should she decide to keep the baby. We don’t often see reproductive horror from the male perspective, but Exit 8 uses this profound but relatable anxiety to inform the imagery and emotional arc of our lead in slick, effective style.
Exit 8 is a strange, bold, and brilliant take on the game’s premise, one that feels distinct as an experience without losing the core of what made the iconic game so popular. If you’ve played the game, I would be especially interested in hearing your take on this movie – did it live up to the original, or would you have liked to see a more unique approach? Let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Variety)
No But Listen 