EXIT 8 -- Best Video Game Movie of April

Review by Steve Barton II

Think back to the last time you left a concert. The echoes of Rascal Flatts’ Life Is a Highway still penetrates your brain as your heart races, while walking through a desolate parking garage. Every floor looks identical, yet your car seems to have disappeared all together. As the distant voices and flickering lights engulf your senses, the horror sets in that you’re trapped in your own hellish maze. If this scenario sounds familiar at all, you may find Exit 8 to be more than just the newest video game adaptation! Exit 8 is based off of a 2023 low budget video game of the same title and even became a VR game just a year later. The film follows The Lost Man (Kazurnari Ninomiya) as he is riding the train and sees a woman being harassed over her crying baby and no one (including our protagonist) intervenes to help her. After exiting the train into the subway station, The Lost Man receives a call from his ex-girlfriend and she’s pregnant. While frantically pacing through the halls, the call drops and he realizes that he’s trapped in a repeating maze that has no simple exit.

Exit 8 does a fantastic job at taking a simple concept and building tension from very little. The sets are mostly confined to 2 or 3 places, but the main set of the white, liminal spaces of the subway hallways are as simple as they are creepy. The design of just a few posters, a couple doors and vents sounds simple and boring, but when they’re distorted or missing, it sends your brain into panic mode! The source material is a first-person POV and while they do experiment with that shot a few times, we stay in third-person for most shots and it works better in the end. While it may have amplified the tension for some scenes, most audiences would’ve checked out due to them thinking it’s “just another found footage movie” and skipped it all together. The sound design for Exit 8 with the small sound effects and emotional music layered in helped sell the whole picture.

The gore hounds and traditional "horror" fans in the audience may hate the simplicity and slow pace of Exit 8, the magic comes more from its performances. Kazurnari Ninomiya plays the lead character incredibly, especially in the emotional scenes where he’s forced to become vulnerable both physically and emotionally. Being trapped in this Groundhog Day or Dante’s Inferno type experience would be an absolute nightmare and we watch The Lost Man slowly descend into hopelessness and pain. Naru Asanuma as The Boy and Yamato Kochi as The Walking Man were also fantastic. Yamato is able to convey so much emotion with just his one stare as The Lost Man turns around. When you hear his footsteps stop (also due to the expert sound design), your whole body clenches without a jump scare to force it.

In the end, Exit 8 is a fun thriller that should satisfy fans of the game and thriller fans alike. While staying true to the source material, the filmmakers expand on the plot and create a compelling experience. It does move a bit slow, but you may find yourself searching for anomalies in every shot and playing along with The Lost Man. Now, who wants to go play tag with me and The Walking Man at the train station at 6:30? 

Exit 8 releases in theaters starting April 10th!

Rating: 3.5/5