Genki Kawamura turns a spot-the-difference video game into a white-tiled nightmare about a man who cannot decide anything, and for an hour it is quietly frightening. Then it sits down to explain itself, and the corridor loses its grip.
Exit 8 is adapted from a video game in which you walk down a subway corridor, look for something wrong, and turn back if you find it. That is the whole game, and Genki Kawamura, directing and writing with Kentaro Hirase, has had the sense to keep it as the whole film for as long as he can. A man (Kazunari Ninomiya, billed only as Lost Man) is on a crowded Tokyo train, earbuds in, when his partner (Nana Komatsu) rings: she is pregnant, and what does he think. He does not know what he thinks. At the far end of the carriage a man is screaming at a mother whose child will not stop crying, and nobody, our man included, looks up.
He gets off, goes down into the underpass, and the underpass keeps going. White tiles, a yellow line on the floor, a right turn, a sign that says Exit 8 is ahead. A notice gives him the rules: if you see an anomaly, turn back; if you see none, carry on; find Exit 8. For an hour this is as good a piece of quiet horror as we have sat through in a while. Then the film stops walking and starts talking, and it is a lesser thing for it. Good, and worth your evening if you like being made uneasy.
Keisuke Imamura shoots most of it from just behind Ninomiya’s shoulder, in long takes, and lights it flat and bright so there are no shadows for anything to hide in. That turns out to be worse than dark. Ryo Sugimoto’s corridor is so exactly like every station underpass you have ever hurried through, down to the scuffed skirting and the grille in the ceiling, that when a poster changes or a door stands an inch open the eye catches it before the brain does. We scanned the frame like a proof-reader, and we were not proud of how badly we wanted to spot it first.
The man in the suit is the film’s best idea. Yamato Kochi, billed as Walking Man, comes towards the camera on every loop, eyes front, briefcase in hand, at the same pace. For twenty minutes he is the only other person in the world and he is precisely the same each time. So when he is at last fractionally not the same, we felt the back of our neck go cold, and we had not felt that in a horror film for some time.
Ninomiya’s job is harder and he does it well. The Lost Man does not decide things, and Ninomiya plays the panic small: a swallow, a glance back, a hand that goes to his phone and finds no signal. Sakura Seya cuts each reset hard, with nothing under it, so the return to the start becomes its own small jolt. Yasutaka Nakata and Shouhei Amimori keep the score out of the way for most of the running time, a low hum under the strip lights, and when it finally arrives it counts.
Then the film widens, in ways we will not describe, and the Lost Man’s trouble with the baby is spelt out in full. Kawamura and Hirase plainly believe the corridor is about a man who lets a stranger scream at a mother and then cannot say yes to his own child, and the corridor had already told us so without a word. For the last twenty minutes we were aware of how long was left, and cross about it, because the film had earned our attention and then spent it on a lesson.
Most video-game adaptations fail by adding too much. This one adds a little, late, and gets away with more than most because it started so spare. At 95 minutes it is the right length for the idea and about a quarter of an hour too long for the film. You will notice, next time you are in an underpass, that you are counting the turns.
