Film Review – Exit 8

July 19th, 2026 | POSTED BY Allen Almachar

It’s not a stretch to say that Exit 8 (2025) could very well be the best video game adaptation ever made. Spooky, bizarre, and endlessly fascinating – the film fully embraces its gaming roots. It places its main character (and thus the audience) in a position where certain challenges and obstacles must be completed before getting to the next level. What unfolds is a series of trial and error, where we learn from our missteps and gradually make our way through the labyrinth. Does this sound like much of a movie in terms of storytelling? Maybe not, but the style, tone, and nightmarish visuals kept me glued in, anticipating what twists and turns were waiting around the corner. 

Directed by Genki Kawamura (who also cowrites with Kentaro Hirase, adapting the game from developer Kotake Create), the story sets up a very simple premise and then takes off from there. A young person named only “The Lost Man” (Kazunari Ninomiya) is traveling in an underground subway. After stepping off the train, The Lost Man receives a phone call from his girlfriend (Nana Komatsu) informing him that she is pregnant. As the man walks through the halls of the metro station, his phone loses connection. After a few minutes, he realizes that he has walked past the same stretch of hallway over and over again. He has seemingly been dropped into an endless loop, seeing the same posters on the wall, passing the same doors and air vents, and encountering a mysterious Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) repeatedly. 

How did The Lost Man get here? Has he entered some sort of third dimension? Is he hallucinating? Is any of this really happening or is it all in his head? The writing and direction smartly avoids any explanation for this, allowing the mystery to maintain the suspense. The only clue The Lost Man receives is a poster detailing a set of rules: 1) Do not overlook any “anomalies,” @) If you see an “anomaly,” turn back, 3) If there are no anomalies, continue forward, and 4) exit at level 8. What is an anomaly? It’s anything unusual or out of place in the hallway with each passing turn. Some of these are subtle, like the placement of a light or the arrangement of the doors and posters. Other times they are overt, like loud sounds, ghostly imagery, or the presence of an entirely new person. Each time the man successfully completes a level, a sign will notify him what number he has reached, from zero to eight. If he fails, he’ll have to start all over from the beginning. 

Like Backrooms (2026), the main attraction of Exit 8 is the production design. We often hear of locations or environments being “another character” of a movie, and in this case the term is the selling point. What makes the hallway here so unsettling is how plain it is. With white tiled walls, gray doors, and a single yellow line down the middle of the floor, the hallway has a minimalist, almost sterile style. But it’s those exact qualities that make it so upsetting. Because it has such an everyday, forgettable appearance, as soon as an anomaly comes in, the entire mood dramatically shifts to malevolence. The hallway becomes a canvas for Kawamura and the rest of the production to flex their creative muscles. Each time The Lost Man travels down it, our eyes shift to all corners of the frame to see if we can spot anything out of the ordinary. Some of the most tension-filled moments are when we can see the anomaly but The Lost Man does not.

Clearly, the narrative follows a repetitive pattern. This is not a detriment but rather a strength, especially in terms of theme. Seeing The Lost Man walking the same path multiple times is a not-so-subtle metaphor for living a humdrum, uneventful life. The opening shot puts us in the point of view of The Lost Man stuffed inside a crowded train. How many times has he been in this exact same position? How many times has he walked down the same stairs and ridden the same escalators, to and from work, nearly every day of his life? It’s not crazy to think that the man has settled comfortably into passive routine. When he receives the call from his girlfriend informing him of her pregnancy, the thought of his status quo getting upended by fatherhood startles and maybe even frightens him. It’s only when he reaches the hallway’s endless loop that he must take matters into his own hands and become assertive. 

Exit 8 is at its best when it stays focused on its central point of tension involving The Lost Man. It’s only when we turn away from him that things start to falter. Maybe it’s due to a shortcoming in the premise itself. How many times can you really have a character perform a similar action and keep it interesting? There is a long stretch where the camera moves away from The Lost Man and turns to two other characters: the aforementioned Walking Man and someone named The Boy (Naru Asanuma) who may or may not be another anomaly. Having these two characters expanded takes a bit of the ambiguity away. The story is most effective when we know less about what is going on. Any form of world building drains the magic out of the film. While it was nice to see how the Walking Man and The Boy fit into the puzzle, knowing more about them actually hindered the sense of immersion. 

There are some really frightening moments. The more jarring instances are not the big, splashy ones, but the smaller, understated scenes. A baby crying, a light fixture out of place, the sound of the Walking Man’s footsteps – these examples surprisingly rattled me the most. The bigger set pieces had an opposite effect. The film takes influence from many sources, The Shining (1980) being one of the more obvious examples. Exit 8 lifts one of that film’s most iconic shots – coincidentally also featuring a hallway. However, the CGI effects here are not quite up to par with the intended outcome. Because the imagery is rendered unconvincingly, the shot ends up feeling too artificial to make an impact. This is a situation where “less is more” may have been the more appropriate approach.

Although Exit 8 may not adhere to the traditional forms of storytelling – in particular plot or character development – it was such a mesmerizing experience that I was completely absorbed from start to finish. Most videogame adaptations feel like watching someone play a game and not letting you have a turn. Here, we are placed alongside the protagonist, going through the emotional rollercoaster with them. We feel a sense of victory every time they complete a level. Every time they make a mistake, it hits us like a ton of bricks. I don’t know if this will change the reputation of videogame movies, but it is a step in the right direction.

Backrooms, Exit 8, Featured, Genki Kawamura, Kazunari Ninomiya, Kentaro Hirase, Kotake Create, Nana Komatsu, Naru Asanuma, The Shining, Yamato Kochi