Exit 8: in the loop

When Pauline Kael reviewed Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), she described the director as traversing the “byways” of cinematic storytelling. “He uses a seemingly random, peripheral course of development, apparently merely following the characters through inconsistencies and inadvertencies,” she wrote; she didn’t mean it as a compliment. When Kael described the quietly perambulating protagonists in La notte as “sleepwalkers”, she was calling out what she perceived as the hypnotic monotony of the Italian master’s aesthetic. Whether or not her scepticism was on point (it wasn’t), she was right to file such lucid-dreamy tactics under the sign of modernism, and also to suggest that Antonioni, with his repertory of glamorous somnambulists and conjurer’s mentality, might be the patron saint – or maybe the drowsy chaperone – of such trance-forming cinematic tactics: a trendsetter for filmmakers in thrall to his strategies.

To say there’s plenty of formal, conceptual and historical terrain separating La notte from Kawamura Genki’s new thriller Exit 8 would be an understatement. But it’s possible to map a route, however circuitous, from one to the other; wander long and far enough and the road from the cinematheque leads to the Nintendo Switch. Like the independ- ent Japanese video game (The Exit 8, 2023) that it’s based on, Exit 8 takes a fugue-state approach to urban alienation; to paraphrase Kael on Antonioni, it’s a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Tokyo party. The nameless protagonist (Ninomiya Kazunari) is a wanderer with a tendency to retreat into himself during his daily subway commute; what he’s withdrawing from is the proverbial hell-of-other-people, emblematised in the film’s opening scene by a crass salaryman cursing out a young mother and her bawling infant a few seats over on the train. A few moments later, our hero gets a call from his lover intimating he’s about to become a father; so much for walking alone.

The video-game version of Exit 8 was a first-person walking simulator originally released by a small company called Kotake Create; the hype around it in gamer circles grew organically. The consensus was that the game’s simplicity was a feature, rather than a bug; its design leveraged paranoid, subterranean claustrophobia against a supernatural expansiveness. The sole location is a warren of brightly lit, white-tiled subway station corridors; to the extent that the game has a plot, it involves following the protagonist – or rather, piloting him – through inconsistencies and inadvertencies, the careful monitoring of which represent the difference between endless purgatory and grateful escape. Byways become blind alleys, and then dead ends; the only way to beat the game is to notice and tally up the discrepancies that manifest with each go-round. These range from minor variations in the decor and ambience to the sudden and scarifying arrivals in the hallway of fellow travellers, a few of whom have designs on harming whoever’s on the wrong side of the controls; playing the game in the dark can be nerve-racking, even if the jump scares land somewhere short of F.E.A.R. (2005) or P.T. (2014) – the freakiest walking simulator of all time, even if it was only conceived by Kojima Hideo and co-director Guillermo del Toro as a teaser for a (cancelled) Silent Hill game.

The Exit 8 came steeped in cinephilia, including frequent nods to Antonioni’s American counterpart (and fellow Kael bête noire) Stanley Kubrick, the great master of cinematic labyrinths. What better way to visualise the theme of miasmatic existential malaise than to integrate the bloody deluge of The Shining’s (1980) lift set piece? It’s impossible to not to think of Kubrick’s classic while navigating Exit 8s meticulously liminal spaces, although I also recalled the astonishing sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018) in which a photorealistic recreation of the Overlook Hotel gets overrun by Gen-Z coded digital-gamer avatars – a plangent, strategically obscene analogy for the ways film history has been reduced (or is it expanded?) into a playground for the video-game era.

To my knowledge, nobody has made a walking-simulator out of La notte, or Sátántangó (1994) (and now I’m thinking about The Simpsons’ resident nerd Martin Prince at the Springfield arcade, pumping quarters into the My Dinner with Andre game). Points of crossover do exist, however. When Gus Van Sant released his gorgeous, Zabriskie-Pointless pastiche Gerry in 2002, he slyly billed the roving, exploratory style as “Béla Tarr fused with Tomb Raider”, and followed up by including glimpses of a first-person shooter in Elephant (2003). In 2009, Chris Marker – who dedicated a significant stretch of Sans soleil (1982) to the hallucinatory qualities of Tokyo’s under- ground transit system – gave viewers at the Harvard Film Archive a live, guided tour through his Second Life archipelago ‘Ouvroir’. (The tour was conducted via the then-popular, sweetly rudimentary online virtual world, with Marker concealed behind his usual feline alter ego Guilliame-en-Egypte.) One museum-like section of Marker’s online presentation was titled ‘Farewell to Movies’, but in an interview with Les Inrockuptibles, this artist eternally fascinated by the hybridity of moving-image culture opted for optimism over Sontagian morbidity. “I’m passionate about the new information grid, the internet, blogs,” Marker mused. “Inevitably, there’s some slag, but a new culture will be born of it.”

In its film incarnation, Exit 8 isn’t new, exactly, but it does feel novel, especially for the first 15 minutes or so. Kawamura takes a considerable risk in these opening passages by aligning us with the perspective of Kazunari’s putative Lost Man; he and we exist only as a reflection, glimpsed subliminally in the moments where the camera isn’t gazing into the black mirror of the iPhone. Gradually the film transitions to a hovering, intimate-but-omniscient perspective that maintains a sense of identification with the character and his objectives; we’re obliged to scan the frame for anomalies, as if diligently keeping track might emancipate us early from purgatory. 

There’s thus a curious push-pull in Exit 8 between active, anticipatory spectatorship and mesmerised passivity; an analogue might be Bi Gan, whose Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018) and Resurrection (2025) are similarly suspended between systemic structure and sensations of untethered movement. (Bi is an avowed gamer; in Screen Slate, he copped to being a Kojima fan, and cited Death Stranding, 2019, as an inspiration for Resurrection.) The difference is that where Bi is willing to test his audience’s endurance, Kawamura leaves a few escape hatches open; a series of ambitious but only semi-effective conceptual departures in the film’s second half suggest a filmmaker who’s trying to thematise the perils of tunnel vision without fully submitting to it. Compared with the season’s other big video-game adaptation – The Super Mario Galaxy Movie Exit is almost cosmically superior; it might as well be Kubrick or Antonioni. But for all its technical proficiency and detail oriented rigor, it’s hard to imagine watching it again, like La notte or The Shining, or Resurrection, which basically demands a second look; it’s a nicely nightmarish place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

► Exit 8 is on digital platforms on 5 June and Blu-ray on 29 June.