Exit 8 Review: The Terror of Repeating Yourself

The tendency of big-screen video game adaptations has been to make the movie more visually elaborate than the source material. After all, if you have endless server farms at your disposal, why not add a few more hairs to Mario’s mustache, or generate a hi-res chicken jockey, or give Pyramid Head even more abs?

The result is a wave of cinematic remasterings that please the hardcore fans but mean nothing to wider audiences. Exit 8, therefore, has two advantages. First, beyond a relatively small number of indie game enthusiasts, it’s not got a huge hardcore base to alienate. Secondly, there’s really nothing to upgrade, graphics-wise. It’s a man walking through a subway corridor, over and over again. That’s it. So all you need is a subway tunnel and an ever-growing sense of unease.

For his second feature as a director, veteran anime producer Genki Kawamura (A Hundred Flowers) has adhered closely to what made game developer Kotakenotokeke’s 2023 psychological horror game The Exit 8 such a creepy success. In this live-action adaptation, the unnamed Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters From Iwo Jima, Assassination Classroom) gets off his train and finds himself in an endlessly repeating white-tiled corridor. It’s not that he’s incapable of getting out. There are, after all, rules posted on the wall: There will be anomalies, and if you see one, you have to turn around. Avoid all the anomalies, and you get to leave by Exit 8.

What’s an anomaly? Anything from a poster out of order to a mysterious grinning Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), to a seemingly mute boy (Naru Asanuma), or a high school student (Kotone Hanase), or red water pouring down the walls. The corridor, or whatever it is that constructed it, is tricky and implacable, and the only way to survive is to follow its arbitrary rules. Screw up, and it’s right back to the start for you.

Kotakenotokeke’s game was, at some levels, an in-joke on the nightmare of endless in-game respawning. What Kawamura (who co-wrote the script with Kentaro Hirase) brings to the surface is the terror of a repetitive existence. Ninomiya plays the Lost Man with a certain quiet panic, as he realizes that he may be his own jailer. Is he trapped because he wasn’t able to commit to his ex (Nana Komatsu), who calls him with life-changing news, or because he failed to intervene when he saw a salaryman berating a woman with a crying baby on the train. In this, the filmmaker is interrogating both societal norms and our own personal moral failings. It’s a challenging and not always successful metaphor, the idea that perfect repetition is the only way to learn the limitations of living such a life, but it’s arguably better formulated as cosmic justice than anything in the Saw films.  

Exit 8 is at its most intriguing when it’s at its simplest: Kochi’s unsettling smile, for example, is far more upsetting than some poorly rendered CG rats with human body parts. Kawamura may be dealing with repetition, but he allows each cycle to feel different enough that the audience won’t feel trapped in the Mobius strip that appears on one of the subway posters. A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, he has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock. Moreover, he finds a new level of optimism that would be anathema to cornerstones of the genre like Ju-on, Kairo, and Ring, where the living and the dead are trapped in endless cycles. There is a light at the end of the subway tunnel, Kawamura suggests, and it’s not an incoming train.

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This article appears in April 10 • 2026.