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Clarence Tsui

3/5 stars
It’s hardly every day that a novelist-turned-filmmaker will follow up an award-winning, genial family drama with a live-action adaptation of a video game.
Appropriating images and ideas aplenty from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Genki Kawamura has turned a simple premise – in which a player is made to run repeatedly down a short underground passage to search for a way out – into a psychological thriller exploring a man’s guilt and redemption.
For those who haven’t played The Exit 8, which has attained cult status among gamers since its release in 2023, fear not: Kawamura did the uninitiated a huge favour by outlining its rules on screen from the get-go.


Reading those instructions, displayed on a wall, out loud, “The Lost Man” (Kazunari Ninomiya) learns that his goal is to look for anomalies in a white, brightly lit passageway featuring simple signage, a few advertising posters, stainless steel doors and an expressionless automaton (“The Walking Man”, played by Yamato Kochi) who walks past the protagonist as if he isn’t there.
For most of the first half-hour of the film the protagonist – and the audience – try to make sense of the proceedings as he moves forwards and back through the hallway. The audience plays the same spot-the-difference game as the man while observing his increasingly agitated state, ably conveyed through Keisuke Imamura’s fluid camerawork and Sekura Seya’s editing.
Out of nowhere, Kawamura jolts the viewer out of this loop by moving the film’s point of view away from The Lost Man, revealing that he is not the only one trapped in an eerie purgatory and subject to increasingly catastrophic twists and turns.
With its fair share of jump scares and grotesque apparitions, Exit 8 ticks all the boxes as a horror movie. To his credit, Kawamura has fleshed out his skeletal source material: he shapes his characters’ supernatural experiences as a projection of their desires, anxieties and fears.

In the film’s prologue – shot in a single take and adopting the point of view of the protagonist – The Lost Man is seen travelling in a cramped subway train and observing an obnoxious salaryman berating a young mother and her bawling baby.
Walking off the train, he receives a phone call from his ex-girlfriend (Nana Komatsu), who tells him she is pregnant with his baby and asks him what he would want her to do.
In Kawamura’s screenplay, this moral dilemma – a distinctly masculine one – seems to be the source of the disorientation and disasters that follow, with quite a few of the subsequent supernatural encounters being shaped around adults’ love-hate relationships with distracting women and innocent-looking children.
This is proof, perhaps, of Kawamura’s understanding of his audience. Exit 8 is a psychological thriller that plays to its core fan base of gaming aficionados; mainstream audiences may chafe at the clichés and illogicality that drive the film towards its denouement.
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Protagonist ‘The Lost Man’ must spot the differences as he walks repeatedly down an underground passage. Expect jump scares and apparitions


Protagonist ‘The Lost Man’ must spot the differences as he walks repeatedly down an underground passage. Expect jump scares and apparitions.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Protagonist ‘The Lost Man’ must spot the differences as he walks repeatedly down an underground passage. Expect jump scares and apparitions

Protagonist ‘The Lost Man’ must spot the differences as he walks repeatedly down an underground passage. Expect jump scares and apparitions