TIFF 2025: Exit 8 Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Video games, it’s been said, are finally experiencing the golden age of film adaptations for which their fans have spent decades clamouring. This isn’t necessarily the byproduct of a steady influx of high quality products—unless the quality of The Super Mario Bros. Movie is measured by the money spent on its soundtrack—but if nothing else, video game fans finally seem to be getting the faithful big screen renditions of the stories they’ve been toying with for years. Then there’s Exit 8, which doesn’t carry with it the sort of nostalgic staying power of a Nintendo property, nor the high-concept narrative of The Last of Us; director Genki Kawamura has tasked himself with adapting a short-form puzzle-type game from two years ago that one can probably finish on their lunch break.

As dubious as the prospect may be to adapt what basically amounts to a psychological horror version of an I Spy CD-ROM, Kawamura latches onto the elements of horror which, in tandem with the elements of tedium inherent in this material, gives Exit 8 an unusual predisposition towards crowd-ready comedic thrills. What the film subsequently does with those thrills may not live up to that potential, but something is certainly worth exploring along the cavernous echoes of this endless corridor.

It all begins with the appropriately dubbed Lost Man (Ninomiya), who steps off a subway passage and seems unable to make it above-ground; at each turn, he finds himself returning to the same hallway marked as “Exit 8,” with no light beyond the blinding artificial metro lamps to be found. Based on a handy sign bearing instructions, the wandering youth realizes that the only way to make it out is to spot any anomalies along the path—find an anomaly, and you have to turn back; find none, you move forward; fail to make the proper distinction, and you start again from zero.

What follows, as expected, is an exasperating exercise in repetitive deduction, but it’s one that Kawamura affords his audience—at first, anyway—the opportunity to experience alongside the subject(s). From the opening first-person POV shot, Exit 8 establishes a steady flow of camera movement that keeps us grounded in the pacing of this nightmarish endlessness, and finds a fair share of comedic material to be wrung from The Lost Man—and, progressively, the stoic Walking Man (Kochi)—and his increasing failures. It’s when the film attempts to get more serious with these realities that Kawamura begins to falter in his own search for clarity.

Framed around a fear of impending fatherhood, whatever latent pro-life sentiments lie at the heart of Exit 8 become progressively difficult to ignore as Kawamura dives deeper into horror imagery, the results of which take much of the fun away from the quasi-interactive sleuthing and instead come to rely on J-horror evocations that largely bleed together into a mush. Complaints about the source game cite its brevity and lack of replayability as a downside to its longevity; Exit 8, as a film, conversely feels too elongated for what Genki Kawamura actually has to work with. When locked into its desired tonal register, the film proves a compelling novelty, but that intrigue can only last so long when the next turn of the corner leads to another empty promise of escape.

still courtesy of Elevation Pictures

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Julian Malandruccolo

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