A Creepy if Redundant Japanese Video Game Adaptation

The press notes for the high-concept, single-setting Japanese thriller Exit 8 explain that the film is a “big-screen adaptation of the viral indie video-game sensation.”

Call me old, or a luddite, or maybe both, but I was completely unaware of the game’s existence before sitting down to watch the movie. That’s at once a good and a bad thing: good, because the film’s major plot twists came as a surprise to me, compensating for the lack of interesting characters or a real story; bad, because you probably have to be a fan of the game to love a movie that doesn’t give you much more than the original, even if the filmmakers try to insert more narrative into the action.

The set-up is simple: a character known only as “the lost man” (Kentaro Hirase) leaves a Tokyo subway and finds himself caught in an infernal loop, walking through the same tunnels as he tries to find his way out of the station. He soon discovers instructions on a wall sign indicating that, if he sees an anomaly in the tunnel, he should turn back. If he doesn’t, he should go ahead. A correct turn takes him to the next level, whereas a wrong turn sends him backwards. The goal is to make it all the way to…Exit 8.

If that doesn’t sound like quite enough material for a feature film, first-time director Genki Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase try to elevate their content by inserting a backstory involving the man’s unseen girlfriend, who calls him at the start of the movie to announce that she’s pregnant. In a way, what happens in the tunnel is a reflection of the man’s own twisting thoughts as he comes to terms with a life-changing decision: take the right path and you keep going; the wrong one and you end up in hell.

Most of Exit 8 plays more like an extended purgatory. That’s certainly the case for the lost man (and honestly, at times, for the viewer), who keeps walking the same path, trying to choose his next move wisely. The experience is not unlike those old “What’s wrong with this picture?” drawings that used to appear in children’s magazines, except here the concept is enhanced with the creepy atmosphere of a J-horror movie.    

If the lost man remains the story’s sole protagonist, he does encounter two other people during his wanderings: The first is an NPC (Yamato Kochi) — or non-player character for those non-gamers out there — who keeps passing by until at some point he briefly becomes the protagonist himself. The second is a little boy (Naru Asanuma) who’s been separated from his mother and proves to be a more perceptive player than the adults.

These additions bring something extra to the plot, though not quite enough to keep us on the edge of our seats. The problem with Exit 8 is that it’s surely more fun to play interactively than to watch passively, even if the filmmakers do a good job sustaining a tone of surreal dread from start to finish, tossing in the occasional jump-scare.

There have been numerous other video game adaptations over the past decade or two, confirming how the gaming industry has ballooned into a media behemoth on par with, if not bigger than, Hollywood itself. Most of those movies have been blockbusters, ranging from Minecraft to Super Mario Bros. to the Resident Evil franchise, that transform the characters of the game-world into action heroes. More ambitious features, such as Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow or Harmony Korine’s artsy experiments Aggro Dr1ft and Baby Invasion, have tried to turn the gaming experience into the very concept of the film, blending the two into a hybrid game-movie.

Exit 8 belongs to the latter category, which makes for some inventive filmmaking early on, especially during an opening sequence shot from the lost man’s point-of-view as he rides the subway and gets off at the cursed station. Kawamura toys with an FPS — or first-person shooter — narrative at that point, but soon switches angles to capture the action in a more conventional way. That’s too bad, because a little more innovation could have gone a long way here, allowing us to escape the redundancy of the maze.

“Do you think we’re dead?” someone asks during yet another round through the tunnels, although the more troubling aspect of Exit 8 is that its unending rat race often feels like a metaphor for life itself — an idea underscored by an early shot of countless Japanese salarymen heading to work wearing the same colorless suits. Kawamura is wise enough to keep that thought alive till the very last scene, making us question whether any of us ultimately have control over our own destinies. It’s all in the game.