Exit 8 (2025)
Exit 8 is a genuine achievement in doing a great deal with very little, and knowing when to stop, which is the rarer skill.
Adapted from Kotake Create’s 2023 indie video game of the same name, director Genki Kawamura takes a premise so spare it could fit on a Post-it note and generates genuine unease from almost no raw material. A man steps off a train and finds himself alone in a white-tiled underground corridor, walking toward Exit 8. He can escape only by spotting anomalies as he walks — miss one, and he’s back at the beginning; spot one correctly, and he must immediately turn around. The rules are posted on the wall, bureaucratic in their precision, and somehow that is the most unsettling thing about the whole arrangement.
Kawamura, who produced Your Name before turning director, brings a producer’s economy to the directing. The production design, cold, repetitive, fluorescent, deliberately banal, creates an oppressive geometry that presses down on you by degrees. Yamato Kochi, as the suited Walking Man who drifts past the protagonist at intervals, inhabits a register somewhere between minor public servant and sustained fever dream. And Kazunari Ninomiya, known internationally from his work in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima, delivers what is, in my estimation, a finely calibrated performance of contained anxiety. He is, for much of the film, simply a man walking down a corridor. This proves harder to pull off than it sounds, and he pulls it off.
What separates Exit 8 from a clever stunt is the psychological weight Kawamura builds in before the corridor closes around its protagonist. The Lost Man, never given a name, had, moments earlier, failed to intervene when a fellow passenger was harassed, and had taken a call from an ex-partner that demanded a decision he cannot bring himself to make. The corridor, then, functions as an extended audit of his conscience. Inattention has consequences. Repetition is the price of evasion. One need not hunt for the allegory; it is posted on the wall.
Where the film is most honest is in its relationship with repetition. The loop structure, by design, becomes wearying, and whether that is a flaw or a feature depends, in my view, on how much patience you bring to a film that wants you to feel its premise rather than merely observe it. The third act loses some momentum, circling when it might have pushed forward. Some viewers will find the emotional resolution earned and affecting; others may feel they have been asked to invest more feeling than the material has quite justified. My sympathies lie somewhere between the two camps, closer to the first.
At ninety-five minutes, the film is committed to economy. It received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes, which is either a reliable indicator of quality or a reliable indicator of Cannes. Outside the hothouse of a festival premiere, Exit 8 holds up as a film of genuine craft and intermittent unease, one that wrings something worth sitting with from a premise that, on paper, has no right to support it, though it pauses near the door long enough to make you wonder.
It would be a pity to miss it through inattention.