If you’ve ever been lost in a subway you know that getting lost in a subway suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks. It’s upsettingly narrow yet paradoxically cavernous, stark in design but grimy to the touch, and the smell of stale urine is somehow worse than the smell of the fresh stuff. You couldn’t pay me to get lost in a subway again, but I’d happily pay good money to see “Exit 8,” over and over, because it transforms the experience into something scary and personal. And also because it wasn’t filmed in Smell-O-Vision.
“Exit 8” is the feature film version of The Exit 8, a 2023 video game about walking through a repeating corridor. You’re searching for anomalies, and if you notice anything unusual — the eyes on one of the posters are following you, or there’s an ominous noise emerging from a storage locker — you have to go back the way you came. If there’s nothing out of the ordinary you move forward, towards the exit. But if you missed something you have to start all over again, and possibly stay stuck forever.
Kazunari Ninomiya stars as the Lost Man, a mild-mannered nobody who gets a phone call from his ex-girlfriend, explaining she’s pregnant. She asks him to make a life-altering decision, out of the blue, and that’s not the kind of thing he does. He can’t even tell an angry man on the subway to stop being a jerk to a poor woman and her child. There are men of action and then there’s this guy.
As he trudges from his train back to the surface, into a life he wasn’t expecting, he finds himself passing through the same hallway, in a constant loop. He’s looking for Exit 8 but he can’t get past the sign that says Exit 1. He’s trapped in a state of non-existence, of almost living, of almost controlling his life. Fortunately for him, and the audience, there’s a poster that explains the rules: Search for anomalies, go back if you find them, move forward if you don’t, and take Exit 8 to leave.
It was very polite of the universe to spell it out so clearly, even if it does make you wonder who’s in charge of this little experiment. What this Lost Man experiences is terrifying but also a metaphor for his inability to accept change and move on with his life, so presumably there’s a supernatural force that’s rooting for him to solve the puzzle and figure his baggage out. Imagine the angel from “It’s a Wonderful Life” if he just threw George Bailey into The Backrooms and you’ve got a sense of how “Exit 8” works. (I’d say that’s one messed up angel but what George actually went through was messed up to begin with.)
There’s not a lot to director and co-writer Genki Kawamura’s adaptation, and there doesn’t need to be. “Exit 8” is a brisk 95 minutes long and even that stretches the premise a little. Still, like the game, the film has an absorbing mechanic. The Lost Man has to search this one, short hallway for any inconsistencies, most of which are scary as hell once you figure them out, and the photography keeps that whole hallway in view so the audience can search along with him. It’s like “Blue’s Clues” if the clues were hairless rats with human eyeballs growing on their backs. Or “Highlights” magazine if Goofus got stuck in the “Spot the Difference” game and experienced pure existential dread.
We obviously don’t interact with the Lost Man and help him on his journey but Keisuke Imamura’s deceptively complex cinematography inspires that glorious urge that only the most absorbing horror movies can offer: We want to yell at the screen. Not to make fun of “Exit 8,” but to stop the hero before he makes a mistake. “Look above you! The light fixtures! The light fixtures are all @$%ed!!!”
“Exit 8” isn’t just one of the best video game adaptations. It might actually be the best so far. Hollywood has a tendency to adapt games which were already obvious riffs on classic movies — “Uncharted” and “Indiana Jones,” “Mortal Kombat” and “Enter the Dragon,” “Silent Hill” and “Jacob’s Ladder” — so when you translate those games back into films, their stories aren’t just derivative. They’re diminished, faded, tired. The premise of “Exit 8” hasn’t been done to death in the motion picture milieu. It takes most of its inspiration from “The Backrooms,” and the feature film version of that online phenomenon isn’t even out yet.
Kawamura has brought something relatively fresh into cinema. That’s great on its own, but what’s more, he’s successfully adapted the game’s premise to tell an effective, albeit simple, cinematic tale about one man’s personal journey. Or, if he never finds his way out of that subway (it is a horror movie after all), a story about his tragic failure to get anywhere in life.
And that right there is the biggest anomaly. “Exit 8” is a video game adaptation that never feels like it’s just cashing in on an intellectual property. It has a story to tell, it tells it well, it’s scary as hell — and it doesn’t smell.
