Exit 8: a video game turned claustrophobic time-loop horror movie

At first sight, The Exit 8, a game launched by Kotake Create in 2023, doesn’t seem promising source material for a live-action feature film, not least one with a running time three times the length taken by an average player to complete the game itself. It’s a simple walking simulator, the location restricted to a small number of white-tiled passageways in a metro station, where the player is stuck in a loop, trudging in circles in search of the elusive Exit 8. The only characters are the player and a walking businessman they pass repeatedly.

According to rules displayed on signs, the only way to advance is to look out for “anomalies”, which can range from slight alterations in the corridor design, lighting, posters and signs displayed on the walls, to alarming shifts in the businessman’s comportment. When an anomaly is spotted, the player must turn and walk in the opposite direction. If they fail to see it, or imagine an anomaly where none exists, their progress is reset, the exit sign reverts, from whatever level the player has reached, to Exit 0, and they have to begin all over again. It’s like a ‘Spot the Difference’ puzzle in which the player must pay attention to seemingly insignificant details.

The director and co-writer of the film is author Kawamura Genki, hitherto best known in the film world as producer of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Monster (2023) and anime such as Shinkai Makoto’s Your Name (2016). For the first third of the running-time, he and his co-writer Hirase Kentaro adhere more or less to the format of the game but add witty flourishes such as Maurice Ravel’s famously repetitious Boléro played over the opening credits, or an M.C. Escher exhibition poster displaying Möbius Strip II – red ants trapped in a figure-of-eight infinity sign.

The scenario stands at the intersection of several genre trends. The corridors are akin to the liminal spaces in, for example, the work of David Lynch, where deserted public spaces such as lobbies or office buildings acquire the attributes of portals to alternative dimensions. The circular nature of the protagonist’s plight echoes the time loops of Groundhog Day (1993) or River (2023), films in which characters experience the same events repeatedly until they happen upon a set of actions to restore a regular chronological setting. There is a touch of escape room, as seen in Escape Room (2019) and, more cerebrally, the Spanish thriller Fermat’s Room (2007), where protagonists have to solve clues to pass from one space to another.

Above all, the ambience in Exit 8 is reminiscent of Backrooms, a creepypasta-inspired web series created by Kane Parsons, who has now directed an A24 film version (scheduled for international release at the end of May). With its endlessly interlocking office spaces, basements and corridors, Backrooms elicits a sense of almost existential dread in the viewer. It also illustrates that phenomenon, seen in films such as the Paranormal Activity franchise, whereby spectators are willing to stare for long periods at nothing much happening, in the expectation that something might happen, or that something uncanny – and almost certainly quite horrible – might intrude, at any second.

Without any of the world-building opportunities available to makers of films or TV series based on games such as Resident Evil or The Last of Us, the screenwriters of Exit 8 devise a succinct framing device, set on a metro train, where the protagonist, subsequently labelled ‘Lost Man’, scrolls on his phone past fleetingly glimpsed sensational news images (some of which are evoked later) and sees a commuter berating the young mother whose crying baby is annoying him. On alighting from the train, Lost Man answers a call from an ex-girlfriend telling him she’s pregnant, to which his reaction is indecisive. It’s then that he gets well and truly lost, as his inability to escape the loop will reflect this indecisiveness back at him.

Some of the tension of the film’s first third dissipates when it breaks away from the game to other points of view, flashbacks and fantasy sequences, nudging the story towards a denouement more emotional and conventional than that of the game. But for much of its running time Exit 8 is a creepy, claustrophobic viewing experience that will strike a discomfiting chord with anyone who has ever felt trapped in the labyrinthine passageways of King’s Cross London Underground station.

► Exit 8 is in UK cinemas 24 April.