These, mostly, are the only other faces in Exit 8. There are other voices, like the ex-girlfriend whose call (she’s pregnant!) rouses the protagonist from his routine stupor, but few other people. Kawamura directs our eyes instead to his film’s own routine, and the rules of that routine’s game. Exit 8 is predominately composed of walking through and observing a single location, a brightly lit hallway with a hanging sign, a series of posters, a few locked doors, a couple vents, a man strolling through, and ending at a curve that contains storage lockers, litter, and a photo booth. If any of this is amiss, or “anomalous” in the language of the film, then the lost man must turn back, moving on to the second level, third level, and so on until reaching the exit at eight. If he fails to find the difference and moves forward, or balks at something unchanged and erroneously goes back the way he came, he resets back to zero.
It first seems like Kawamura will be emulating the experience of playing the game, shooting the long opening take as a POV shot that makes immersive use of noise-cancelling headphones, before transitioning to a slick third-person perspective more akin to watching someone else play the game on Twitch (complete with the urge to enter chat and tell the player that he’s terrible at this very simple game). Both approaches favor the illusion of unbroken takes, where cuts are masked around turned corners, to keep our attention rapt. Through this approach and the film’s script, Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase savvily translate the teaching experience and learning curve of a game to film, leading the audience and this poor sap alike through the maze and its rules. Evoking the stark, static, structural images of Chantal Akerman’s unsettling Hotel Monterey or the fuzzy frames of Skinamarink that make you lean in too closely looking for something out of the ordinary, Exit 8 knows it’s tedious, and plays with what it can find among the boredom.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s tedious, nor is that quality fully alleviated by the film having a far more coherent narrative than either of those experimental films. As the Lost Man navigates this living Highlights puzzle, his asthma acts up, he encounters the aforementioned child, and he mulls over that life-changing call he received right before finding himself stuck in public transit purgatory. The latter two clumsily contribute—alongside ubiquitous crying-baby sound effects lifted straight from P.T. (the ur-text for games about scary, looped L-shaped halls)—to the thematic plight of this possible parent-to-be. What better time to consider big life decisions than when stuck in one of the many soul-sucking patterns that make up our days?
It’s not hard to see why these in-between spaces, the repetitive crap that clogs up your day, is resurging as a setting for psychological horror. Workers chafe against back-to-office mandates, their commutes spent sucked into screens filled with doom and gloom or dissociating on familiar drives. Those scrolling in their free time freefall into the infinite feed. Exit 8 excels at capturing that isolation and disaffection in an elegant environmental ouroboros, though what it does once it establishes its atmosphere never matches that simple artistry.
Director: Genki Kawamura
Writer: Kentaro Hirase, Genki Kawamura
Starring: Kazunari Ninomiya, Yamato Kochi, Naru Asanuma, Kotone Hanase, Nana Komatsu
Release Date: April 10, 2026
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