A lost man desperately counts the number of doors and lockers in a nondescript hallway. He obsessively checks the words written on hanging banners, and looks for any kind of visual indication that there’s something wrong. Once he’s certain that nothing is amiss, he heads toward the end of the corridor, but is suddenly startled by the sound of a baby crying coming out of the lockers. He breaks into a sprint, hoping to finally find Exit 8 and escape from this hellish corridor.
Produced by Toho and directed by Genki Kawamura, Exit 8 tells the story of an unnamed Japanese man (Kazunari Ninomiya) who finds himself trapped in an infinite corridor. In a place where logic is constantly defied, the lost man must deal with his emotional uncertainties before he can escape.
It’s a simple premise, but a surprisingly effective one. Based on the 2023 video game of the game name, Kawamura’s movie proves the director understands both his source material and the power of its metaphor. Exit 8 is a rich symbolic experience that offers an alternative path forward for future video-game adaptations.
The video game Exit 8 falls into a genre known as walking simulators (games where walking through an environment is the main activity, sometimes with puzzles to solve, but rarely with any traditional combat or action). In the game, you play as someone trapped in an endless corridor. To escape, you need to follow a simple rule: If there are any abnormalities, head in the opposite direction. Completing the game involves analyzing the corridor and choosing which way to correctly go eight times in a row. If you ignore or miss an abnormality and go to the wrong side, you lose all your progress.
Exit 8 doesn’t follow the conventional design of trendier walking simulators designed around jump scares (like Bloober Team’s Layer of Fear). There’s no intricate lore or direct allusions to well-established horror tropes like eldritch creatures. Even so, the simple existence of the corridor and the absence of any logic tied to what happens inside of it (sort of like the Old House in Remedy’s Control) make Exit 8 feel distinctly modern in its sense of dread — and makes it one of my favorite horror games in recent memory. So when I found out that Exit 8 was now a movie, I was intrigued but skeptical. Could this simple-yet-terrifying experience translate into another medium? The answer turned out to be yes, but not in the way I expected.
Kawamura makes an unconventional decision in his adaptation of Exit 8. He uses key elements of the original work, but ties them to a brand-new character. Unlike the game with its anonymous protagonist, we know a lot about the person who’s trapped in this corridor. Ninomiya’s character is a young man with a part-time job. Before becoming trapped, he talks to a woman who he appears to have a relationship with and who is now in the hospital. She’s pregnant.
This information alone completely redefines the Exit 8 experience. Kawamura gives the story’s endless loop a new meaning by turning it into a metaphor for the main character’s feelings. Throughout the movie, Ninomiya’s unnamed protagonist debates with himself whether he can be a father or not. Until he makes a decision, he’ll be stuck in limbo.
While the corridor becomes an extension of the main character, it’s also a broader metaphor for the cycles of life and masculinity. In the movie, three generations of men are connected: the main character, an older office man, and a little boy. We meet the other two as the office man tries to find the exit so he and the boy can leave. However, the office man is torn between the desire to save himself or to be a good person and help the boy escape, too. The juxtaposition of these male characters inside the infinite corridor reinforces the idea that men are constantly running from their decisions and abandoning the people that depend on them.
Kawamura’s choice to begin the movie with his protagonist listening to Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, a 15-minute orchestral composition that repeats its melody with various instruments, reinforces the same themes. Only through the physical and nightmarish experience of being trapped in this loop does the protagonist finally begin to question his own behavior. This modern — and less diabolical — version of hell in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno guides the lost man through a personal journey to defy the cycle he was born into.
Exit 8 the movie might not be as scary as Exit 8 the game, but the ways in which Kawamura uses that creepy, white corridor to tell a much more personal story make this a worthy adaptation. It’s fascinating to see how the digital corridors from the game take a material form in the movie, but with a completely different meaning. Instead of simply being an eerie place where bizarre events take place, they become the manifestation of a visceral uncertainty so many of us deal with in our own lives.
By giving a face and a history to the characters inside the corridor, Kawamura creates a completely new experience, and that’s a good thing. There will always be a market for faithful, bit-by-bit adaptations of our favorite video games, but the symbolic universe many of them create for each player is commonly ignored. With Exit 8, the director clears a fruitful path others can follow when adapting video games. A path where the original material is respected, but there’s room for different and new stories to be told.
Exit 8 premiered at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. The film does not yet have a U.S. release date.
