Glass ceiling broken! In general video game adaptations have been getting better. The TV shows work wonders for the bigger open world games. But the movie adaptation have still been stuck in mediocre hell. I’m inclined to say the OG Mortal Kombat might STILL bet the best one…until now. Exit 8 sets a new bar for how good a movie adaptation of a video game can be. Props to you Japan, for taking this creative challenge seriously.
After failing to help a woman getting berated by an ahole on a train, a lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) ends up at Exit 8 in a train station. After passing a walking man (Yamato Kochi) and going to exit the station, the path leads to…the same exact hallway. With the same exact walking man, wall posters, 3 doors, and two vents. Or are they the same? Dehydration and losing an inhaler has the lost man questioning everything he sees and if it is real or not.
How director Genki Kawamura transforms Exit 8 from video game to film is masterful. He Halloween’s us into the hallway, using first person to put us in the headspace of our lost man as he slowly realizes he’s in a loop. The opening walk itself is deeply unsettling: imagine how you’d feel walking in a hallway loop that you realize never ends? We feel the man’s panic as his reality settles in on him. But then he settles down, where we learn the rules of the hallway: see something weird (an anomaly), turn back around; looks good? Go forward. And if you mess up? You’re back at 0, having to start over. Kawamura mixes up his anomalies, so some are clear, and others are not. Seeing the overhead sign repeatedly say “turn back around” is wonderfully chilling in its fluorescent glory. As is turning around to see the walking man with the most exaggerated, inhuman grin following you VERY closely. As the lost man thinks he’s found his stride, there’s a slight change to a door handle that he misses, and he’s back at 0, forlorn, pushing closer to despair. Like the game itself, you start to feel like the guy, eyes darting back and forth, trying to remember if that photo was in the right order or not, or if it goes door vent door or vent door vent.
Spotting the anomaly is fun, but that’s a video game, not a story. Kawamura allegorically takes Exit 8’s forever hallway and extrapolates it to fill in just enough of a tale to keep us invested. Who ends up here? People who are lost: this man, as we learn about to become a father, or a boy (Naru Asanuma) who runs away from his mom & dad. Both regret their decisions, and have to decide if they want to stay lost forever or gain the courage to push forward, nice! Easy characters for us to understand and quickly invest in without much effort. How do we know what happens if you get lost forever? That’s where Kawamura broadens our minds just a bit. In the game I didn’t care about the walking man as I was deep in poster examination, but Kawamura shifts us to his point of view when Exit 8 is starting to get annoyingly repetitive, so we understand what’s at stake if you make the wrong decision one too many times. It’s not earth shattering emotional complexity, but it’s simple, powerful, and propulsive enough to keep us trying to get to level 8 before its too late.
So American gamer and movie lovers, balls in your court? Are we stuck in endless cash grab Mario and FNAF movies forever? Or is someone going to really try to make something interesting out of a video game besides Markiplier? Here’s hoping Iron Lung made so much bank he starts a movie company to make great video game adaptations that actually try something, cause I think the studio’s decided it’s hedgehogs and plumbers and that’s it.