Exit 8 the video game is built on repetition. You play a commuter stuck in the serpentine hallways of an underground train station, only they aren’t really serpentine as such. They are about three dog legs that loop back on each other, and the task is to find the anomalies in each iteration of the loop, so you can steadily work your way through signs that point to Exit 0 up to signs that point to Exit 8. And there are some spooky bits of j-horror iconography along the way, because the game is Japanese.

Exit 8 the movie is also built on repetition, but this is more of a problem for a movie than it is for a video game. In a video game, you are engaged in the repetitious activity exactly as long as you want to be engaged in it, and if it’s wearing thin you can always go fold your laundry. In a movie, you’re trapped in that tunnel along with the commuter, for however long the filmmaker deems to keep you there – in this case, just over 90 minutes.

And to be sure, it’s the aforementioned anomalies that break up the monotony. That’s also where Genki Kawamura’s film fails to fully distinguish itself, sometimes feeling like it’s expended an iteration without much of significance occurring, sometimes introducing narrative bits that will never pay off, sometimes even failing to play by its own rules. Which doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a lot to recommend in Exit 8.

At least it’s not also one of those movies that’s shot entirely from the first-person perspective, in the style of the video game, which is how Exit 8 spends its first five minutes. The commuter, played by Kazunari Ninomiya, is aboard a subway at rush hour, where he and everyone else has their eyes locked on their phones. The only anomaly, so to speak, is a crying baby, whom the mother is trying to shush, but not with sufficient enough urgency for one fried commuter, who starts tearing her a new one.

When our commuter, known in the film as the Lost Man, exits the train, he’s done nothing to stand up for the mother, just like all the other commuters. But perhaps that’s because it hits a little too close to home. He’s been ignoring the phone calls of a woman, but when he finally answers, she confirms she’s at the hospital and that she is indeed pregnant. The Lost Man tells her he’ll call in sick, and really does intend to shift his plans for the day – except that he rounds one corner and encounters an empty hallway. That is, it’s empty except for one robotic looking man who walks through it, emerging at one end and making a right turn toward our hero.

This becomes a very familiar scene, as the Lost Man continues to experience it on repeat around each next corner. Turning back the way he came is fruitless – though sometimes it’s part of solving the mystery to escape. A set of instructions on the wall tells him to look for the anomalies in the environment and turn back if he finds one, though not turn back if it’s the same as the previous iteration. He’ll steadily work his way up toward Exit 8 this way, but any mistake will start the process over again. So he begins counting posters, photo booths and air ducts, and steadily losing his grip on reality.

It sounds like a really good concept for a movie, kind of a version of the familiar Groundhog Day structure where a character has to live through the events of the same day multiple times. Those films, which have been plentiful in the past decade, usually use a form of fast forwarding the action so you don’t have to go through a full iteration of the events each time, maybe only on the first two or three to establish the pattern. Exit 8 never fast forwards, relying on the introduction of new elements – such as new characters – to create its sense of stakes. The problem is, the stakes never feel truly significant, considering that starting over is more of an annoyance than it is an existential threat to the man. (He’s an asthmatic, but this plays a disappointingly small role in the events, kind of like Chekhov’s inhaler that never goes off.)

Kawamura’s film does find variation in changing focus to other new characters, such as Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), whose story we begin to follow as his own middle chapter of a three-chapter narrative structure. And yes, if the rhythms of the film had lulled us into a sort of numb captivity, this change in perspective does awaken us for a moment. But each of these new “resets” promises a deepening of our understanding of this world and its rules, but stops just short of delivering that.

Now the good stuff. The aforementioned j-horror iconography is really well done here. The Walking Man, who otherwise doesn’t communicate when the Lost Man sees him, has sometimes crept up behind the Lost Man with an uncanny smile plastered across his face. Then there’s a teenage girl who shows up (Kotone Hanase) whose initial seeming humanity deteriorates into something else entirely. We should know to fear long-haired women in j-horror. Exit 8 creates a consistent sense of creepiness with occasional flashes of body horror and other elements that keep us invested and involved.

It’s just that Exit 8 is the sort of film that leaves you wondering why it doesn’t amount to a little bit more. Even as it explores some themes related to the Lost Man’s impending fatherhood, these don’t land quite the way you hope they would. What’s more, it feels as though they are grafted on to give some additional weight to a video game that doesn’t have any themes of its own – because that is indeed what they are.

Even with a fair amount of nitpicking directed at it, Exit 8 is well worth seeing. It just isn’t quite the positive anomaly in the mindbender/horror landscape you were clearly hoping for when you went in.

 

Exit 8 is currently playing in Australian cinemas.