‘Exit 8’ turns a horror game into a Kafkaesque thriller
TIFF plays host to an impossible adaptation of a Japanese walking simulator
Yamato Kochi as Walking Man in "Exit 8."
Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
Based on a video game that should be impossible to adapt, Genki Kawamura turns in a nerve-shredding, claustrophobic horror-thriller in the form of Exit 8. The Cannes Midnight selection—which is now playing in Japan, and makes its North American bow at the 50th Toronto Film Festival—follows a young man trapped in a mind-bending Penrose hallway resembling a Tokyo subway station, a scenario that yields a series of surreal puzzles for him to figure out.
To talk about why the movie works—which is to say, the sheer feat of its existence as an adaptation—first requires understanding The Exit 8, the 2023 walking simulator released by Japanese developers Kotake Create. The first-person POV experience finds the player in a tiled, zigzagging hallway that seems to loop around in ways that defy physics; alternating left and right turns should get you further away from where you started, but in The Exit 8, you end up back in the same spot no matter which way you turn. A mysterious middle-aged NPC (non-player-character) strolls by you each time, as you pass by various doors and advertisements that don’t seem out of the ordinary, until you circle all the way back to a counter on the wall, which starts from zero. The instructions printed on a nearby poster are simple and clear: spot an “anomaly” or anything out of the ordinary, and you must turn back and go the other way. If everything seems “normal,” proceed forward as usual. Either way, you start your next walkthrough back at the same place, but the right decision turns the counter up by one, getting you closer to the desired eight points, and opening up an exit. However, a wrong turn resets the counter back to zero. Some people finish the game in a mere twenty minutes, but in theory, you could be trapped by its recursive mechanics for much longer.
How, then, does one extract human drama from such a repetitive premise? It turns out, Kawamura and co-writer Kentaro Hirase aren’t all that interested in reverse-engineering a story from the idea of clicking left, right, and forward. Instead, they concoct one wholesale and superimpose it onto the game while adapting its mechanics first and foremost, transforming its infinite turns into an absurdist metaphor for indecision.
The film begins by borrowing the first-person language of the game, tethering its camera to its anonymous lead character, dubbed the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), an anxious 20-something who starts out aboard a subway train, and freezes instead of intervening in a rageful dispute. As he alights and makes his way out of a crowded station, his girlfriend calls to reveal she’s pregnant, and asks to know if he’ll remain involved. His answer, at first, is a lengthy silence, and before he knows it, he takes a wrong turn and enters the repeating hallway—a spot-on re-creation of the game—which he soon learns he cannot leave.
Once the film enters this nightmare realm, with its oppressive fluorescent lighting, the camera detaches itself from the Lost Man’s perspective, exploring not only the space around him, but his gradual realizations and his fragile emotional state. He even seems desperate to reach out to the zombified NPC who repeatedly passes by him, the business-like Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who smiles eerily, and even stops on occasion, but never speaks or acknowledges the protagonist’s existence. As our ostensible hero figures out this game, Kawamura slyly introduces the audiences to its “anomalies” as well, directing our gaze towards or away from them, depending on whether we’re meant to notice. These changes to the environment range from subtle (like minor differences in the posters when the Lost Man circles back to them) to jolting and horrifying, like rivers of blood ripped from The Shining. Where we might be in control of every decision in the video game, the movie robs us of that power in order to maintain tension and surprise—beats made all the more discomforting by a musical score that controrts the chimes of a subway PA system.
What further separates the two mediums (other than the actors’ physically committed, emotionally operatic performances) is that Kawamura also uses the never-ending hallway as a canvas for psychological projection. He turns the more horror-centric anomalies into narrative flourishes that range from thematically relevant, like a young child running by, to emotionally potent, like a projection of the Lost Man’s girlfriend speaking to him. This practically turns different levels of the puzzle into flashbacks and premonitions. In the process, what would merely be a click or a scroll in the video game becomes a series of vital dramatic decisions, each rooted in the anxieties of fatherhood and coming-of-age.
Kazunari Ninomiya as Lost Man in "Exit 8."
Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
But Exit 8 doesn’t stop there. For Kawamura, dramatic adaptation is also an opportunity for mischief, and he practically breaks open the premise of the game (while remaining trapped within its confines) in order to switch POV in wildly unexpected ways. He turns the basic idea of multiple players engaging with the same game, at the same time, into a phantasmagorical depiction of how people’s paths can cross and impact one another. While the specifics are better left unspoiled, the result is a film that not only traces the Lost Man’s fears through both past and future, but spreads them out across the game’s seeming infinitude via a potent embodiment of paternal angst across generations; what if the middle-aged Walking Man isn’t just a random NPC, but an externalization of a deep-seated consternation? At the risk of sounding vague (the specifics really are a wonder to discover firsthand), a child solving the hallway puzzle might react differently from an adult, or an older man, and how these decisions are connected—if at all—impacts how the story is told, and the very nature of the winding metaphor.
The video game’s jump scares and eerie happenings make for a fun escape, but Exit 8 traps you with its white-knuckle thrills. The game’s goofy, spooky happenings still unfold at regular intervals, but what’s more chilling in the movie version is that an outside world clearly exists, imbuing the story with realistic, dread-inducing stakes for the Lost Man that circle the question of whether he actually wants to leave this game—or if he wants to keep playing for all eternity, trapping himself within a stunted, arrested development. Within the film’s emotional purview, both outcomes are equally terrifying.
Published on September 9, 2025
Words by Siddhant Adlakha
Siddhant Adlakha is a critic and filmmaker from Mumbai, though he now lives in New York City. They're more similar than you'd think. Find him at @SiddhantAdlakha on Twitter