Genki Kawamura’s “Exit 8,” adapted from a video game developed by Kotake Create, is the rare film that succeeds by embracing rather than eschewing its roots in the medium. In critical parlance, describing a movie as akin to a video game usually amounts to a term of derision. Scorn runs through the perverse, voyeuristic pleasure of first-person shooting or the unchoreographed melee of an action sequence.
But Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase demonstrate how an empathetic, tightly controlled work of cinema need not cast off its origins in a role-playing exercise. Their rendering of “Exit 8” as a 95-minute feature delivers a deeply involving watch by leaning into a lesser-explored element of gaming. By putting their characters through an impossible doom loop that could make M.C. Escher blush, the filmmakers successfully translate the endlessly iterative fun of gaming into a narrative paradigm that accumulates force as it moves forward. It’s a simple concept that opens pathways to sincere self-examination.
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“Exit 8” takes the existential angst of Jean-Paul Sartré’s similarly titled work “No Exit” and turns it into a gamified Möbius strip. The viewer does not have control over the character, as if manipulating it through a joystick. But Kawamura gets as close as possible to that experience by going through the paces in a seemingly endless Tokyo subway corridor with his archetypally named avatars: The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), and The Boy (Naru Asanuma).
Each man finds themselves trapped in a compact maze of hallways, looking for a portal to leave. For no evident reason, they’re each caught in this logic-defying physical paradox. This setup forces them to intuit the rules and tricks to keep making progress … just like any video gamer would on the other side of the screen. Kawamura, neither condescending to nor confusing the participants, does not offer an exposition dump of instructions as to how this liminal space functions. “Exit 8” allows audiences to discover how to play through trial and error, the integration of learnings, and the strategizing of victory in lockstep with the protagonist.
Without belaboring the absurdism of its setup, some masterfully executed monotony helps outline the protocols. The Lost Man, as the narrative’s preliminary focal point, guides the discovery process. Exit 0 functions as a starting point, and anyone who can successfully master each “level” can move one exit further toward the magic eighth. The task to advance, however, requires the recognition of even the tiniest anomaly in the hallway he originally walked down. Any mistake resets his progress and kicks him back to the start.
“Exit 8” captivates even as it lulls viewers into a repetitive rhythm with The Lost Man’s confinement, advancing when he spots no anomalies and doubling back when he does. If the film amounted to little more than a live-action game stream, it would still prove interesting (to a point). But Kawamura understands a crucial principle of cinema and storytelling: the point of establishing patterns is to break them. These ruptures powerfully puncture the purgatorial plodding, adding depth and dimension to the despairing wanderers. The film’s perspective and style shift significantly, yet never at the expense of the core existential dilemma powering gameplay.
Just as the men grow more naturally comfortable navigating the space over time, so too does Kawamura condition and train his audience to stop thinking about the premise in terms of its inevitable binary outcome. A video game, not unlike any recreational sport, provides an artificial and heightened framework of action through which to enact life’s psychodramas. As the mundanity of meandering these never-ending hallways weighs on the characters, the veneers of their civilization fall away and reveal the submerged needs and desires of fathers and sons alike.
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. Kawamura understands that a video game, like life itself, is not merely something to beat. It’s all the trying, failing, and incorporating incremental improvements based on these experiences that make any victory feel satisfying. A game can serve not just as an escape from reality but as a mechanism to master it. [B+]
“Exit 8” opens in theaters on Friday, April 10.
