We all know that movies based on video games can be extremely hit-or-miss. Just ask whoever greenlit Return to Silent Hill, which came and went silently to movie theatres a few weeks back, and received pretty terrible reviews. There are exceptions to the rule (I’m a big fan of the original Resident Evil film…I know, I know), and maybe we’ll see some with this year’s upcoming Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat movies.
In the meantime, I highly recommend checking out Exit 8, a Japanese film based on a game of the same name.
Here’s the logline: Based on the global hit eponymous video game created by KOTAKE CREATE. A man trapped in an endless sterile subway passageway sets out to find Exit 8. The rules of his quest are simple: do not overlook anything out of the ordinary. If you discover an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you don’t, carry on. Then leave from Exit 8. But even a single oversight will send him back to the beginning. Will he ever reach his goal and escape this infinite corridor?
While I haven’t played The Exit 8, I have seen it appear in various online shops, and the concept behind it definitely piqued my curiosity. The great thing about this film adaptation is that you need to know nothing about the game to enjoy it; its concept, as described above, is simple, yet horrifying. Consider Exit 8 the surreal, slightly horrific sibling to Groundhog Day, minus the laughs.
Exit 8 asks its audience for something hard to give a film these days – our attention. Like our lead character, The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), we’re looking for anomalies, differences between iterations of the seemingly endless hallways. Director Genki Kawamura insists upon our eyes, and in an era of chit-chat and cellphones during movies, uninterrupted attention is hard to come by.
Mind you, Kawamura and his co-writer Kentaro Hirase don’t just want our eyeballs engaged with what’s on screen; through Exit 8 and The Lonely Man, they’re asking us, the audience, to think about who we are as human beings, the decisions we make, and the actions we take. Stuck in this loop, The Lonely Man is forced to contemplate his lack of action on the subway when a new mother is berated by a fellow passenger about her crying baby, and how that inaction will affect him as a father, following the news that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant. I found myself contemplating my own life and decisions while watching Exit 8, which was certainly an unexpected reaction to the movie.
Exit 8 is a deep, thoughtful film that stays engaging throughout its 90-minute run time. It’s well worth watching when it hits theatres in North America on April 10.
