“Exit 8” Gets Lost in the Monotony
In 2023, KOTAKE CREATE premiered their indie video game, The Exit 8. Released on Steam, The Exit 8 takes place in an abandoned metro station that is a liminal space. The unsettling yet simple nature of the game made it a critics’ darling, so it’s no surprise that a feature film adaptation followed. Directed by Genki Kawamura, Exit 8 premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival before its Japanese release in August of the same year. Kawamura took the bones of the game, added an interpersonal conflict for the lead character, and extended the storyline to make the world of Exit 8 feel more cavernous than before.
A man, referred to only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), rides a packed subway to his temp job. Upon exiting the car, he gets a phone call from his ex (Nana Komatsu). It’s patchy and drops out from time to time, but he hears the important thing: she’s pregnant and it’s his. The phone call drops a final time and the man begins to look frantically for his exit. The signs point to Exit 8, but for some reason he can’t seem to leave. A sign on the wall has a set of instructions: Don’t overlook anomalies. If you find anomalies, turn back immediately. If you don’t find anomalies, do not turn back. Go out from Exit 8. The passageway The Lost Man has found himself in perpetually loops upon itself. The only sense of progress he can see is an Exit sign that counts the number of successful trips down the passageway The Lost Man takes. He must succeed eight times in order to exist.
courtesy of NEON
It’s interesting that the video game was inspired by the internet creepypasta story of the Backrooms, which will also be available on the big screen this year. The Exit 8 is essentially a spot the difference game. That aspect of the source material makes an interesting interactive component for the audience. Once viewers learn that the key to escape for the main character is anomalies, their eyes wander to corners of the passageway. How many doors are there supposed to be here? Was that the right order for the advertisement posters? Has anything changed?
The problem with Exit 8 as translated to the big screen is that the viewer is not in control. The enjoyment of a game like this one is to be the one to solve the puzzle. The Exit 8 forces a player to test how well they process the world around them. In the film version, the viewer is forced to be a passive participant. They may notice the anomaly long before The Lost Man does, but they’re forced to wait as he looks everywhere but the place he needs to. Similarly, the looping nature grows wearisome after a while. The audience knows so little about The Lost Man, his ex, and whether or not they should be parents that this deep dilemma holds little weight. Judging by how long it takes for him to solve this puzzle, the signs are pointing to no to parenthood.
There is not a lot of meat on the bones of Exit 8. The anomalies are easy to spot, the emotional weight is too hollow, and the setting isn’t claustrophobic enough. What made the game, and ones like it (Papers, Please comes to mind), is its tense, unsettling environment, and the failure of attention to detail when put under the microscope. Exit 8 is monotonous. It’s a walk that eventually ends and the audience is told that The Lost Man had some emotional growth without seeing the process of achieving that change. But even after all that time spent circling those hallways, the audience doesn’t learn how he got there. The viewer doesn’t need a full explanation, but Exit 8 does need to prove its worth that is undermined by the repetitive nature of the film.
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