Liminal space is a destination of choice on the internet, where games and creepypastas have long drawn on the uncanny power of empty offices and deserted thoroughfares.
Exit 8, the cult 2023 video game from Kotake Create, offers a defining example of this eerie aesthetic: a minimalist walking simulator confined to sterile, white-tiled subway corridors, unfolding as a Möbius loop, with a single objective: find the darned exit.
Expanding such a premise into a feature-length film might sound like an overreach. Yet the writer-director Genki Kawamura, working with his co-author, Kentaro Hirase, discovers a surprising elasticity within the concept.
Taking cues from the gameplay, this compelling psyche-out is deceptively simple. Trapped in an endless passageway, the protagonist, credited as “Lost Man” and played by an increasingly frantic Kazunari Ninomiya, must scan his surroundings for anomalies: a glitch in the lighting, a warped poster or the timing of the freakishly smiling commuter who passes him at regular intervals.
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Spot something amiss and turn back; miss it and the entire system resets. Exit 1 slips back to Exit 0.
Never mind the first-person chicanery of Doom and Hardcore Henry: here, the viewer swiftly assumes the same hypervigilant, paranoid mindset as the unfortunate hero.
It’s a parallel universe away from the unlovely worldbuilding associated with a genre that has spawned World of Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed and Silent Hill.
Kawamura initially cleaves closely to the game’s structure, adding a minor incident of moral cowardice, and peppering the material with playful allusions: Ravel’s swooping Boléro over the credits, and a poster nodding to MC Escher’s Möbius-strip geometries.
The psychogeographical effect sits somewhere between the uncanny corridors of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, the Lodge in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, and the B&B from Groundhog Day.
This elegant horror arrives within weeks of the incoming creepypasta-inspired Backrooms, a film similarly rooted in depopulated spaces and cosmic wrongness. Spooky extradimensional expanses are this month’s welcome vibe.
In cinemas from Friday, April 24th
