A younger Japanese man trapped in a brightly lit, surreal hallway desperately counts the variety of doorways, vents, and lockers. He obsessively checks the phrases written on the poster advertisements lining the partitions, as he appears for any form of visible anomaly. As soon as he’s sure nothing is amiss, he heads towards the tip of the hall, however is all of the sudden startled by the sound of a crying child, a noise he realizes is coming from one of many lockers. He breaks right into a dash, hoping to lastly discover Exit 8 and escape this hellish hall.
Produced by Toho and directed by Japanese writer and anime producer Genki Kawamura, Exit 8 tells the story of an unnamed “Misplaced Man” (Kazunari Ninomiya) who discovers he is trapped in an infinite subway hall. In a spot that continually defies logic, The Misplaced Man should cope with his emotional uncertainties, or he’ll by no means escape.
That easy premise is surprisingly efficient. Primarily based on the 2023 indie online game of the identical identify, Kawamura’s film proves the director understands each his supply materials and the facility of its metaphor. Exit 8 is a wealthy symbolic expertise that provides another path ahead for future video-game diversifications.
The online game Exit 8 falls into the walking-simulator style — video games the place strolling by means of an surroundings is the principle exercise, typically with puzzles to unravel, however not often with any conventional fight or motion. In Exit 8, the participant is trapped in an countless hall. To flee, you observe a easy rule: For those who discover any abnormalities, flip round and head in the wrong way. Finishing the sport entails analyzing the hall and accurately selecting which method to go eight occasions in a row. For those who ignore or miss an abnormality, you lose all of your progress.
Exit 8 does not observe the fashionable conference of designing strolling simulators round leap scares, like Bloober Staff’s Layers of Worry. There is not any intricate lore, no direct allusions to well-established horror tropes like eldritch creatures. Even so, the straightforward existence of the hall and the absence of any logic tied to what occurs inside it (type of just like the Oldest Home in Treatment’s Management) make Exit 8 really feel distinctly trendy in its sense of dread. These components additionally make it considered one of my favourite horror video games in current reminiscence. So once I discovered that Exit 8 was now a film, I used to be intrigued however skeptical. May this simple-yet-terrifying expertise translate into one other medium? The reply turned out to be sure, however not in the best way I anticipated.
Kawamura makes an unconventional resolution in his adaptation of Exit 8. He makes use of key components of the unique work, however ties them to a brand-new character. Not like the sport with its nameless protagonist, we all know loads about the one that’s trapped on this hall. Ninomiya’s character is a younger man with a part-time job. Simply earlier than the hall lure closes round him, his ex calls to inform him she’s pregnant, and within the hospital for assessments. She must know the way he feels about presumably turning into a father.
This data fully redefines the Exit 8 expertise. Kawamura offers the story’s countless loop a brand new that means by turning it right into a metaphor for the principle character’s emotions. All through the film, Ninomiya’s unnamed protagonist argues with himself about what he needs to do along with his ex’s data. Till he decides, he’s caught in limbo.
Whereas the hall turns into an extension of the principle character, it is also a broader metaphor for the cycles of life and masculinity. Within the film, three generations of males are linked: the principle character, an older workplace employee, and slightly boy. We meet the opposite two because the white-collar employee tries to search out the exit so he and the boy can depart. Nonetheless, he is torn between the need to save lots of himself and the urge to be a very good particular person and assist the boy escape, too. The juxtaposition of those male characters contained in the infinite hall reinforces the concept males are continually operating from their choices and abandoning the individuals who depend upon them.
Kawamura’s alternative to start the film along with his protagonist listening to Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” — a 15-minute orchestral composition that repeats its melody with numerous devices — reinforces the identical themes. Solely by means of the bodily and nightmarish expertise of being trapped on this loop does the protagonist lastly start to query his personal conduct. This contemporary — and fewer diabolical — model of Hell in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno guides the misplaced man by means of a private journey to defy the cycle he was born into.
Exit 8 the film is not essentially as scary as Exit 8 the sport, however the methods Kawamura makes use of that creepy white hall to inform a way more private story make this a worthy adaptation. It’s fascinating to see how the sport’s digital corridors take materials kind within the film, however with a very completely different that means. As an alternative of merely being an eerie place the place weird occasions happen, they turn out to be the manifestation of a visceral uncertainty so many people cope with in our personal lives.
By giving a face and a historical past to the characters contained in the hall, Kawamura creates a very new expertise, and that’s a very good factor. There’ll all the time be a marketplace for devoted, bit-by-bit diversifications of our favourite video video games. However the person, private symbolic universes many video games create for every participant are generally ignored. With Exit 8, the director clears a fruitful path others can observe when adapting video video games: a path that respects the unique materials, however accepts that there is room for various and new tales to be instructed.
Exit 8 opens in U.S. theaters on April 10.
