Film review – Exit 8

My notes on Exit 8

Ever since Super Mario Bros., Hollywood has been trying to turn popular computer games into hit films – and the backlist is littered with disasters, also-rans and the odd huge hit it’s impossible to care about.  The fundamental problems are twofold – a) almost all hit games are sketchy spins on pre-existing film genres (eg Resident Evil is a zombie movie) and so films based on them are doubly derivative and b) the experience of watching a film is not the same as the experience of playing a game.  Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8, based on a game called The Exit 8, shows that some games can have film equivalents which aren’t wastes of time – and it’s much more successful an adaptation than the Silent Hill films or the recent Japanese The Convenience Store in that it doesn’t take the obvious route of overexplaining the basic situation – which is all about being stuck in a limbo based on a part of a Japanese subway station and trying to get out – but instead gives us a protagonist (Kazunari Ninomiya) with just enough skin in the game to make us care about his survival.

First, ‘the Lost Man’ is a camera viewpoint like a game avatar but eventually he appears centre screen – he reads as a slacker just out of college but the actor is 41 – and we’re trotting after.  His ex has just phoned to tell him she’s pregnant and he has to rethink is life just after he’s had a tiny everyday experience on a crowded tube train which he thinks of as a test he’s failed (not speaking up for the mother of a crying baby being shouted at by an angry salaryman).  While distracted by a phone conversation, the Lost Man gets lost, following signs to a paradoxical trap region with posted rules about turning back every time an anomaly is spotted, which range from ‘what’s wrong with this picture’ items like a doorhandle in the wrong place or an upside-down number to an infestation of lab mice with human facial features growing out of them or deluges of blood and seawater.  One of the posters walked past repeatedly is of an MC Escher exhibition, which ought to be enough of a clue – we get to know this stretch of tunnel as well as those trapped in it (three other characters pass by, some no longer human) and are invested in the gameplay looking out for anomalies.

We split from the Lost Man to the Walking Man, a previous player who has become a smiling NPC disturbing presence, for a section which also brings in a Boy and a near-ghost girl, but this flashback dovetails with the going-forward action as the hero comes to terms with impending fatherhood by bonding with the initially silent kid (who could have saved a lot of time and perhaps some horrible fates just by saying what he sees) and completing the course … which means making eight passes of the loop, turning back for each proper anomaly spotted when failure means the count going back to zero.  It’s hypnotic and brilliantly-staged, with many long takes or apparent takes through the unnervingly ordinary main set.  Good double bill with Death Line or Groundhog Day.