In the Japanese psychological thriller Exit 8, a workaday Everyman (Kazunari Ninomiya) is unenthusiastically heading to his temp job on Tokyo’s subway. But when he exits the train, he can’t find the way out of the station. As he walks past the gleaming white-tiled walls, he follows the signage toward Exit 8, which never emerges. He’s caught in a nightmarish loop, and he gets increasingly desperate. Will the guy, named “Lost Man”, be trapped forever?
This is a movie about endless repetition, so how does director and co-writer Genki Kawamura keep us engaged for an hour-and-thirty-five minutes? First, Lost Man encounters other solitary, and seemingly random characters in the station corridors The most vivid is the rigidly-postured, pony-tailed Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) – who is he, and why isn’t he panicking about being lost, too? Later, there’s a boy, a high school girl and the apparition of someone the Lost Man knows. To make the Lost Man’s escape even more frantic, he learns he has to deal with a life-changing development outside the subway system.
Although it’s not obvious, Exit 8 is based on a labyrinth game, and there’s a subway information placard with the instructions to keep going as long as there are no anomalies, but to turn back if an anomaly is spotted. Kawamura gets us to follow Lost Man as he essentially plays the game by trying to spot the anomalies
Finally, Kawamura deploys some horror movie techniques. There are jump scares and disturbing images and sounds. While I was watching Exit 8, The Wife was in a different room, but she still got scared by the soundtrack. There is no gory body horror.
96% of the story is in a maze comprised of the same three or four corridors of a subway station, filmed on a set. The rest was shot in three actual Tokyo subway stations.
This is a film unlike any we’ve seen, and it’s pretty entertaining. Exit 8 is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube and Fandango.