Exit 8 Review: A Looping Exercise in Liminal Dread…With One Massive Anomaly

PLOT: A young man searches for a way out in an endless subway tunnel.

REVIEW: Look, I’m a gamer. Always have been. But I’ll be completely honest with you guys. As the years pile on and the gray hairs multiply, my tastes have started to mutate. Sure, I still love the chaotic, sweaty thrill of an online multiplayer. But when I’m not aggressively muting swearing children in a deathmatch lobby, I find myself falling down a very different kind of rabbit hole.

I’m talking about smaller, liminal horror games. The kind of tight, atmospheric experiences that rely on extreme, meticulously crafted dread. Hell, my personal GOTY lately is not some massive bloated AAA mess. It’s REANIMAL.

And that very specific itch for claustrophobic terror leads us directly to the doorstep of a little cult indie hit called The Exit 8.

If you’ve played the viral walking simulator from Kotake Create, you already know the torturous psychological game we are dealing with here. It’s a brilliantly simple, phenomenally twisted puzzle of looping subways that you can beat in under an hour. You just walk down a sterile, brightly lit underground corridor, looking for anomalies. If you see a subtle shift in the environment, you turn around. If you don’t, you keep walking. Simple, right?

So naturally, when they announced a movie adaptation of a game that favors experiential gameplay over actual storytelling, I had one simple question: how in the hell do you stretch a lean liminal space simulator into a full theatrical experience? We just saw this happen with Iron Lung. The general consensus out there felt that movie was overlong, but I actually loved it because it took something with absolutely no plot and made it incredibly visually interesting.

Director Genki Kawamura attempts that same magic trick here by getting inventive through simplicity. He creates a pristine, white tiled corridor that is sparse in detail, ensuring the audience can keep track of the game right alongside the trapped protagonist. And that’s where Exit 8 truly shines. It perfectly captures the essence of gaming. The fun comes from scouring the screen for clues and picking up on subtle shifts in the decor before the characters do. Sometimes you notice a terrifying anomaly that the onscreen character misses entirely, which instills a massive dose of dread for the inevitable, bizarre, and increasingly cosmic consequences of failure.

Our Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) navigates the physicality of his character with incredible skill. He is an asthmatic, timid guy paralyzed by fear, but Ninomiya plays the cowardice without ever veering into unlikable territory.

But when you spend your days writing ending explained videos and breaking down scripts, you know a threadbare plot when you see one. And the more our Lost Man attempts to find his way out of this twisted endless loop, the more the thin narrative begins to drag down the dizzying mind trap of horrors.

The movie opens with a wonderfully executed, extended first-person sequence where our guy gets a call from his pregnant ex-girlfriend. She is unsure whether to keep the baby. That panicked indecision becomes the entire driving force of his character arc. Kawamura toys with the narrative structure, weaving in nonlinear perspectives of the creepy grinning Walking Man (Yomato Kochi) and a young boy (Naru Asanuma) to touch on the theme of guilt. But once the boy fully enters the equation, the movie loses all of its nuance. It stops being a tense mystery and starts feeling wildly moralistic in its heavy pro-life messaging. We never get a real sense of who the Lost Man is beyond his indecision, which means the emotional stakes in the third act feel incredibly low and the climax loses a lot of momentum.

Ultimately, the filmmakers had the perfect blueprint for a legendary psychological horror and chose to make believe they were directing a family drama instead. And you know what? That’s not a bad thing at all. It’s just not what I was expecting going in or even promised from the trailers. That always seems to be the trend these days. I’m looking at you, Undertone.

Still, what Exit 8 lacks in storytelling, it completely makes up for in endless creativity. Even when the emotional arc is easy to map out in advance, there is absolutely no predicting the aural and psychological terrors waiting in that bizarre limbo. It successfully translates the interactive, immersive horror of playing a video game directly to the silver screen. And if this ever turns into a series, I’ll be there front and center trying to find more anomalies.

Let’s just hope A24 and Kane Pixels are taking notes for the upcoming Backrooms movie. If they can capture this exact level of liminal dread without getting bogged down by a preachy subplot, we are going to be in for an absolute masterpiece.

Exit 8 opens in theaters on April 10th.