Movie Review

Movie Exit-8 and the Horror of Living in the Past

A review of Genki Kawamura’s Japanese Film Exit-8.

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I lived in Tokyo with my then-newlywed wife 20 years ago. We both look back on that time as one of the best phases of our lives. Those memories are still fresh in a way few others have.

The food. The culture. Even the gentle rhythm of daily life.

Whenever something comes up that lets me reconnect with Japan, even tangentially, I usually take it. When I saw that Vue cinema was screening the 2025 hit Japanese film Exit-8 locally, I told my wife we had to go. A ChatGPT search informed me it was based on a game of the same name.

Sold.

THE PREMISE

I saw it last weekend in a practically deserted cinema in the UK. Five minutes in, I was hit with that feeling of walking Tokyo’s subway corridors all over again.

I hadn’t played the game and knew next to nothing about the plot going in. My wife speaks good Japanese, so she kept whispering to me and laughing whenever the subtitles didn’t quite match the dialogue.

Now, coming to the core story, A man, played by Kazunari Ninomiya, finds himself trapped in a subway corridor. The doors keep closing in front of him.

There are rules. If something looks off as you walk past it, turn around. If nothing looks off, keep walking. Head towards Exit 8. That is it: no weapons, no map, no allies.

If you get it wrong, either by missing an anomaly or turning back when nothing was off, you’re sent to the start. Loop zero. The corridor resets. You try again.

Director Genki Kawamura, who made If Cats Disappeared from the World, takes this very simple idea and slowly builds the horror.

It kicks off with a phone call. Our man finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. He’s not sure how he feels about being a father yet. He’s riding the train when he spots someone harassing a young mother because her baby won’t stop crying. No one else says anything. Our man doesn’t step in either. Suddenly, he wakes up in the corridor.

Impage Source: Instagram

MY REVIEW

What lingered with me was how normal everything looked.

Flat lighting, plain walls, forgettable posters. Nothing stands out as horror. Just a feeling that something isn’t right. That’s what gets under your skin.

At some point, you realise that “spot the anomaly” isn’t just part of the rules of the journey. It applies to life, too. Our hero had his moment earlier. A regular situation with genuine consequences, and he failed it by doing nothing.

So did everyone else in the carriage, but that is the point. The corridor is just the same test on repeat, until he learns to see it. Those tiny moments. The ones we choose to look away from. That’s what defines us.

Ninomiya is excellent as the lead actor. You can see him change with each loop. He starts okay. And then he starts to lose his cool.

I also liked Yamato Kochi as the silent Walking Man. Nothing about him feels overcooked — no twitches, no menacing stares, no theatrics. He looks like someone I might have stood beside on a Tokyo train without noticing. That is exactly what makes him unsettling.

Also nice to spot an homage to an *M. C. Escher print later, with red ants marching along a [Möbius strip](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip)*. Nothing subtle about it, a loop within a loop, the metaphor practically waving at you from the wall, but I liked it anyway.

Some bits don’t land quite so well. After your second or third loop, you have a good idea where this is going. Given the premise, the film runs the risk of feeling repetitive.

*Ravel’s Boléro* is also woven into the climax. On paper, this should be a disaster. The piece is too famous, too overused, too easy to laugh at. Somehow it doesn’t land that way. The slow build of the music and the slow build of the loops meet in the right place.

Exit 8 probably isn’t for everyone. It’s not your typical horror movie. There are no jump scares. No BOOM! moments. The scares are much quieter than that.

But that also makes them stick with you longer than you expect.

CONCLUSION

So if you like Tokyo, and you love movies like *Cure, Pulse, and Cloud*. Pop down to your local cinema and give Exit-8 a watch.

The day after I watched it, I took the train into London. Mid-journey, I caught myself instinctively looking back down the carriage behind me.

This is usually a good sign.

Exit 8 is the kind of film that sticks with you after you leave the cinema. It finds you in quiet moments down hospital corridors or on rainy Sunday afternoons or silently drifting through Tokyo train stations.

They say nothing sticks in Tokyo. People come, people go. Movies. Jobs. Love. But some things do.

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