☆☆☆½
Exit 8 opens with a man on his way to a temp job. He's riding in a packed Japanese subway train, and not everything is going well. When he exits the train, he gets some unexpected news, then promises the caller he's on his way.
He's not.
The man is never given a name other than The Lost Man, and given his temp job, his casual clothes on a train full of suited men, and his bedraggled appearance, that moniker may have more than one meaning. So, too, may Exit 8, though this isn't Last Year at Marienbad. Based on a video game, Exit 8 is puzzling and engaging, clever and diverting, and filled with symbolism and meaning, but it's not inscrutable.
Building on a 25-minute video game that is all about careful observation, director Genki Kawamura (who co-write the adaptation with Kentaro Hirase) has created a film filled with dread, a movie crafted to do two things, both of which it does well.
The first is to captivate the audience with its simple story: On his way out of the subway station, the man finds himself trapped in an endless loop. The promised Exit 8 never appears. Over and over, the man wanders the same set of geometric hallways, always seeing the same businessman, the same set of posters, the same set of doors. What's going on?
Eventually, the man finds a set of instructions. They promise that if he can follow each rule carefully eight times, he'll get to the exit.
Why? Who knows. But it works. And it sets up the second thing beautifully:
As the man encounters slightly different moments, as the hallways fill with increasingly worrisome sights and sounds, the audience sees what he misses. The small audience I was with shouted at the screen — "Go back!" "No!" "Turn around!" — and not in a way that damaged enjoyment of the movie.
Exit 8 puts you right there with this Lost Man, invested in the outcome and in his every decision, focused even more than he is on the backgrounds and the details, and equally frustrated when one mistake resets the whole of the game.
Just as it seems the idea is about to wear thin, this tight 95-minute puzzler offers up something new, and if some of what the subway exit throws the man's way seem random, that may just be because you weren't paying enough attention in the opening shots. Memory and trauma, both personal and collective, also factor in to the story, as does a healthy dose of Stanley Kubrick.
Not for nothing does Exit 8 feel a lot like roaming the hallways of the Overlook Hotel, and it's no coincidence that a gushing wall of blood seems a direct callback to The Shining — this is a movie that hopes to be as labyrinthine as Kubrick's, as stacked with hidden detail and meaning.
Over time, Exit 8 may well get the sort of die-hard audience it deserves, the kind who wants to count up every gleaming white tile to see if it all means something. Does it? I think so — and it seems salient that the one thing Exit 8 asks viewers to do is put their phones down and concentrate, to focus on the world on screen. And, when the lights go up, maybe on the world around them, too.
Viewed April 19, 2026 — AMC Universal 16
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