Exit 8

Writer-director Genki Kawamura keeps his camera angles tight, the better to maintain tension at a boil, and makes the most of his minimal and repetitive set. Fans of the Canadian horror classic Cube should enjoy.

As the film nears its conclusion, “Exit 8” becomes as emotionally enriching to feel through as it is enigmatically engrossing to play through. These minimalistic trappings help construct a shared space in which the redundancy of the setup can give way to meaningful reflection.

You enter this unlikely, but undeniably extraordinary take on a video game ready to be spooked. You exit it with the sensation that you’ve just witnessed a waking nightmare perfect for Tokyo commuters and Brooklyn sad dads alike.

After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.

A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.

The movie is more of an anxiety dream than a full-fledged nightmare, and the more typically unsettling imagery...feel perfunctory.

It grows tedious because it feels like we’re holding our breath waiting for something more significant to happen for the lead’s character development, and yet it remains largely stagnant. Exit 8 has so much squandered potential. It might have made for a better short film than a full feature, but as a psychological horror, the film falls flat.

When it comes to the horror genre, you can always expect some big surprises from Japan. The story of three characters searching for a way out of an endless loop may seem repetitive, but it manages to surprise the viewer without resorting to cheap effects, and with an ending that leaves questions unanswered.

I was interested to see how they would adapt an indie game with no real plot into a **** the first act, it felt like they accurately captured the eerie, claustrophobic psychological terror of the endlessly looping subway. The film draws the audience in by having them scan for anomalies, just like the main character. There’s also strong tension in watching him struggle with his asthma while trying to escape.However, this is largely lost from the second act onwards, as the film shifts toward being more character-driven and leans into a metaphor for fatherhood. The tension and sense of terror fade, and even the asthma subplot is completely forgotten. While the execution isn’t great, the film is still well-made, with excellent camerawork. It’s not overly long and is generally an enjoyable 90 minutes.

Exit 8 is practically the definition of “works better as an idea than as a movie.” Genki Kawamura nails it in adapting the game: the aesthetic is there, the logic is there too, and at various points you find yourself trying to spot the anomalies alongside the protagonist. The experience **** problem arises when it has to become a feature-length film. What is tension in the game becomes repetition, and what could have been expanded becomes mere insistence. It lacks a story to sustain all of this; it lacks a development that goes beyond the **** you can’t even say that the horror holds up on its own, because it appears more as a possibility than as something truly **** the end, it appeals to those who already know the game and even expands on its concept a bit, but it never finds the strength to sustain itself. It feels more like a stretched-out experiment than a complete film.

I want to exit the existence of this subpar film that serves as nothing but noise pollution.

I went in knowing only the game. The movie starts slow and quiet, with not much dialogue. The story overall was boring. I missed 15 minutes because I fell asleep; that's how quiet the movie is. The background story of the metro man was interesting but you get 0 answers. Waste of my time.