To get an idea of how video game movies have shifted, one need only look at the adaptations released over the last week. On the one hand, you’ve got the massive blockbuster The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which takes a maximalist approach to exploding the Nintendo Cinematic Universe. And then you’ve got director Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, a sparse, psychological nightmare based on the Kotake Create game that is essentially a really creepy walking sim horror. There’s so little to the latter that it frees up the movie to be pretty much anything and everything, and what Kawamura came up with was to make a paranoia thriller that doubles as a coming-of-age drama. Weird, yes, but somehow it works…eventually.
The premise of Exit 8 is deceptively simple. The protagonist, referred to only as Lost Man (played by J-Pop star Kazunari Ninomiya) must find his way out of a seemingly endless labyrinth of subway tunnels. Ever been temporarily lost in a subway station of a parking gargage? Well, imagine that times a thousand. The man’s indecisive nature enhances the story. It begins as he watches an angry commuter yelling at a new mother about her crying baby, and chooses not to get involved. While walking to a job interview, the man gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend who reveals she is pregnant and doesn’t know what to do about it. He doesn’t have any answers there, either, and walks around in a daze for a until he figures out that he’s been walking around the same bland, white-tiled tunnels with all of the signage leading him back to the beginning.
While Lost Man is typically alone for the first half of the film, he’s not the only one in those hallways. There’s the creepy, grinning Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) with his briefcase, and The Boy (Naru Asanuma), a lost child who becomes more of a fixture later on. Similar to the video game, Lost Man’s only hope of getting out is to spot the various anomalies and reverse course. To miss an anomaly will only get him sent back to the entrance, or possibly to reap increasingly bizarre, supernatural repercussions.
The success of Exit 8 is how brilliantly it translates the addictive nature of the game for the moviegoing experience. Because the central conceit is so simple, audiences can spend their time obsessing over the anomalies and spotting them before the protagonist does. These can be anything; such as different posters along the walls, different signage, or characters acting strangely, which they all do at some point.
Lost Man’s guilt and timidity are themes that inform his every action, but other than that we don’t get to know much about him. He, and the other characters in Exit 8, are thinly defined for a reason, so that we can map our own attitudes and beliefs onto them, to better relate. They are quintessential video game avatars that don’t require a lot of backstory. That said, this only works the more you are invested in the mind-boggling premise. For me, the film starts off extremely slow and Lost Man isn’t interesting enough to see that through.
However, the psychosis-inducing production design and eerie corridors captured by DP Keisuke Imamura eventually ensnare you like poor Lost Man himself. And just as we think we’ve got Exit 8 all figured out, Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase flip the script, not only adding a new protagonist but increasing the otherworldly strangeness to ridiculous levels. And yet, as the film gets odder, a larger ethical message emerges that adds unexpected depth. Ultimately, Exit 8 is about a lot more than a man trying to find a way out. As video game movies get bigger, louder, and franchise-heavy, Exit 8 is itself an anomaly that dares to be different.
Exit 8 opens in theaters on April 10th via NEON.
