3/5 stars
Itโs hardly every day that a novelist-turned-filmmaker will follow up an award-winning, genial family drama with a live-action adaptation of a video game.
Appropriating images and ideas aplenty from Stanley Kubrickโs The Shining, Genki Kawamura has turned a simple premise โ in which a player is made to run repeatedly down a short underground passage to search for a way out โ into a psychological thriller exploring a manโs guilt and redemption.
For those who havenโt played The Exit 8, which has attained cult status among gamers since its release in 2023, fear not: Kawamura did the uninitiated a huge favour by outlining its rules on screen from the get-go.
Reading those instructions, displayed on a wall, out loud, โThe Lost Manโ (Kazunari Ninomiya) learns that his goal is to look for anomalies in a white, brightly lit passageway featuring simple signage, a few advertising posters, stainless steel doors and an expressionless automaton (โThe Walking Manโ, played by Yamato Kochi) who walks past the protagonist as if he isnโt there.
For most of the first half-hour of the film the protagonist โ and the audience โ try to make sense of the proceedings as he moves forwards and back through the hallway. The audience plays the same spot-the-difference game as the man while observing his increasingly agitated state, ably conveyed through Keisuke Imamuraโs fluid camerawork and Sekura Seyaโs editing.