Directed by Genki Kawamura | Written by Kawamura, Kentaro Hirase, adapting the video game by Kotake Create | 95 min | ▲▲▲▲
An average guy (Kazunari Ninomiya) takes the subway, presumably in Tokyo. He notices another man freaking out at a woman whose baby is wailing, insisting she get the baby to be quiet. He’s being rude and unreasonable, but nobody does anything. Our guy, who the movie calls the Lost Man, he gets on the phone with his girlfriend (Nana Komatsu) who is pregnant. She’s not sure whether she’s going to have it, and wants to know what he wants. He loses the signal in the tunnel as he’s heading to the surface, while suffering from an asthma attack.
But the tunnel never ends. He starts to see the same signage, the same ads, the same chilly tiled infrastructure, the same walking man (Yamato Kochi) around every second corner.
He slowly starts to piece it together — he’s stuck in a space and time loop. In order to get out he has to follow simple instructions: look for anomalies. If he sees an anomaly, he turns back, which moves him closer to Exit 8. If he misses any, he goes back to Exit Zero and has to start again. The anomalies can be anything from a small difference in the signage to blood oozing from the walls.
And yes, you’d be right to think structurally Exit 8 shares a few things with the cult Canadian sci-fi, Cube, but what lifts it to a new level is the technical illusion. There’s certainly some sly CGI at work, but at no time did I ever doubt I was in this space, a utilitarian, unremarkable subway passage.
Folks with a heightened sense of claustrophobia may suffer particularly. What works inarguably well is that sense of being trapped in a bad dream — the allegory of circular thinking and anxiety, inspired by the protagonist’s fear of being a bad parent. It’s a journey into the lead’s mind, with little possibility of escape. The choice to use Ravel’s “Bolero” to the score is a strange one — I guess I always thought of that piece of music as more sensual than this film — but it also has a relentless cyclical motion.
There’s a reasonable argument to be made that even the concise running time of a little more than an hour and a half is a stretch for this kind of repetitive structure — and shifting perspectives to other, “non-player” characters is a creative license that may not entirely work, but the illusion created is remarkable.
This is based on a video game (unplayed by me) but it’s not hard to see how the gameplay likely looks. It doesn’t necessarily equate to exciting cinema but full marks to what has been accomplished here — a unique and surprising science fiction with dark, horror and thriller elements. Go see it at the cinema where it’s harder to escape.
