‘Exit 8’ Review: The Viral Indie Horror Game Stuns on the Big Screen [B+] TIFF
It’s always a fun and exciting exercise to see how a videogame gets adapted or reinterpreted on the big screen. Such is the case with Exit 8, based on the viral indie horror game that sparked a whole subgenre of “spot the anomaly” indie horror games.
Instantly as the film begins, director Genki Kawamura pulls off a neat trick, opening with a POV shot of our protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) on the subway train, and it continues until we get to that iconic hallway and fall straight into the loop itself. Now as a videogame, this is where our “cutscene” will end and we can start moving our character with the controller. But here, Kawamura smartly leaves the POV and it becomes a full-fledged film where we follow our lead.
The premise runs the same exact way the game does, with its set of rules: spot the anomaly. If everything looks normal, you continue down the hall. If you spot an anomaly, you turn back around. In order to get out successfully, he must complete the loop eight times in a row (hence the title). Fail and you are condemned to start over again at Exit 0.
Our lead quickly picks up on a few things that are always the same in this hallway: five advertisements, fire hydrant, door, vent, another door, another vent, and most of all, a mysterious man (Yamato Kochi) who turns the corner and walks down the hallway with his suitcase in hand. On a normal loop, the man would simply walk past our lead, as we hear his business shoes clack away into the distance, until we turn around and spot him again. But then suddenly the walking would stop, we turn, and the man is staring right into our lead like something out of the Smile films.
What follows is essentially a twisted Groundhog Day, or more like Dante’s Inferno, as our traveler struggles to identify what is “wrong” with each iteration of the subway. Like most videogame adaptations, Exit 8 must overcome the hurdle of feeling tedious. That is, if you had the controller in your hands and you were playing this game, you would probably complete it in thirty minutes or less. But Kawamura and Ninomiya constantly find unique ways to play in this singular set, as they torture the protagonist and incorporate a narrative storyline involving his ex-girlfriend, who calls to tell him she’s pregnant and undecided whether to keep the baby.
Typically, adding a story narrative into a game that never needed it could backfire. But by integrating the new story immediately into the film’s opening – in that unique POV shot – the film quickly recontextualizes the meaning of the loop itself, as the feeling of being trapped adds on another layer of guilt to it and anomalies take on a deeper meaning as representations of our lead’s anxieties and fears.
And then right when the film is about to get repetitive, a story curveball gets thrown that I certainly did not see coming. Not only does it provide a much needed sense of structure to a premise that can certainly lose itself in its multiple iterations, but it also expands the scope and potential lore of the premise as well. Though it does inevitably make the runtime longer, Exit 8 benefits from having multiple human points of view, as we watch how such a loop can mentally deteriorate someone who is already wrestling with inner turmoil.
But the real hero of Exit 8 is the camerawork. With cinematographer Keisuke Imamura, Kawamura creates a dizzying sense of atmosphere from start to finish. The camera starts from behind the actor, then turns over their shoulder to see what they’re seeing, then swerves around so now the camera’s moving backwards while the actor moves forwards. Time and time again, as our lead turns the corner to see if he’s made any progress, the camera is right there and turns the corner with him. It easily brings to mind the work of Stanley Kubrick in The Shining, as we follow Danny on his tricycle, turning corner after corner until we stumble into a horrifically uncanny image.
Both Ninomiya and Kochi (yes Exit 8 players, you will understand) give excellent performances that are physical and exhausting, but it is Kawamura’s sensibilities with the camera that provides another level of disorientation and unpredictability to this loop. Most of all, it is his sensibilities as a storyteller that turns this small little videogame into a big thoughtful story. Though players of the original game can certainly make the argument that the original game is still scarier – the film does leave out some of that game’s best anomalies – the story and character work here is wonderful, making Exit 8 not only one of the better videogame adaptations, but just a brilliant rendition of an original work of a different medium.
Grade: B+
This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Exit 8 will be distributed in the U.S. by NEON.
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