September 12 2026, 16:40

Exit 8

Director: Genki Kawamura

Release year: 2026

A man gets a call from his girlfriend while getting off an underground train in Tokyo, and she tells him she’s pregnant. She’s disappointed at his muted reaction, but before he can express his feelings to her, he loses the connection and finds himself lost in the station corridors looking for Exit 8.

The film is based on a 2023 indie video game. I also spotted a novelisation written by the film’s director in Waterstones. The game’s rules are simple—follow the corridor, which will loop back on itself, and for every subsequent loop look out for anomalies, and if you spot one, turn back. There are three characters in the film: The Lost Man from the train, The Walking Man, who walks past The Lost Man in every loop, and The Boy, a child who ran away from his mother. Their varied interactions keep the story moving along and prevent things from getting too repetitive.

Unfortunately it was still too repetitive for me. The characters kept making annoyingly bad decisions, and the metaphors were too literal to keep my attention. It’s about a man stuck on a boring day job working long hours and afraid to become a father. The film makes him reckon with that position. Game over.

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