“Exit 8” Review: Tokyos U -Bahn is an endless purgatory in the “ingenious” video game adjustment | Reviews

Dir. Genki Kawamura. Japan 2025. 95 minutes

The themed music of Genki Kawamura's conceptual cold Exit 8 Is ravel boleroBut it could easily have been singing with Bob Dylan: “There must be a way out of here …” Based on an influential video game that is the same name. Exit 8 plays like a nightmare version of the classic His field Episode about the attempt to flee from an underground parking lot -except that the place is a Tokyo -U railway station and an apparently endless round, which increasingly comes to purgatory or the phrases of the human mind itself.

A rare play -based film that actually has the feeling of a game

The director and the established writer Kawamura played similar visual and temporal games to create the experience of age efforts in his drama 2022 Hundred flowers. In Exit 8, He uses such devices for a completely different purpose. This ingenious mind twister contradicts the integrated repetition of the IP to ingenious and entertaining, although sometimes mechanical effect with echoes of highly conceptual films such as Vicenzo Natali's Dice And a more radical, crazy Japanese intervention -curiosity, Hitoshi Matsumotos 2009 symbol. A rare play -based film that actually has the feeling of a game with confusing difficult rules, Exit 8 Should be a solid cult status beyond Japan.

The nameless protagonist of the film (Kazunari Ninomiya) travels in the middle of a lot of commuters to work on the Tokyo-U-Bahn, who have all lost in their phones-with the exception of a stressed man who drives the mother of a crying baby. He ignores this and takes away and takes a call from his ex Anie gives him some potentially life-changing news that he is obviously not yet ready. This sequence carried out in a long POV intake or a clever simulation sets out the drama, in which the hero, which was identified in a caption as “Lost Man”, cannot get out of a zigzaging corridor that allegedly leads to a difficult to grasp 8.

There is no one nearby, except for an older man who is robotic past him (the so -called “walking man”, played by Yamato Kochi). An indication of this proclaims a number of rules for escape: pay attention to “anomalies” and miss them at your risk. But as other figures appear in this sealed world, the lost man must determine whether they are with unfortunate hikers or themselves.

The lost man continues and sometimes turns around, his many years of progress edited to make the brightly lit tiled round appear endless while the camera surrounds around him and improves the feeling of disorientation. The film plays the exciting feeling of repetition – we always hope to find something new and important on every corner. The way it seems that the film belongs nowhere, Kawamura makes a sharp unexpected detour to follow more.

There is no logical explanation for what is happening, although a figure offers speculative interpretations – but the film gradually becomes clear, albeit not entirely graceful, that the difficulties of our hero are very strongly associated with the current state of his life, and with an ethical crossing that has triggered its whole trip. The underlying topic of the social and personal conscience of the drama rises significantly Exit 8 Beyond the more mechanical aspects of his gaming jumps, although Kawamura does not quite deal with it without a certain disgrace.

In the best case, the turns are cleverly false to the audience and the characters, although there is a grotesque jumping section that goes hand in hand as a harmful deviation. Otherwise allusions on The epidemicBoth in pictures and in compositions in the Kubrick style and for the Moebius strip art of MC Escher, the film give the film a really worrying coherence. Ryo Sugimoto's production design gives a dream dimension of what is said to appear an everyday environment. The action also provides a plausible human factor, with Ninomiya wanding between despair and composed determination and Kochi contributes an eccentric and unpredictable presence.