The Mind-Bending ‘Exit 8’ Turns the Subway Into Your Worst Nightmare — If It Wasn’t Already

Anyone who’s been on a New York subway these days knows the hell you’re often in for. Never mind the teeming, bunched-in masses. As cell phone service expands on the MTA and headphones seem to have no value underground, we’re subjected more than ever to doomscrolling at full volume — and the nauseating, water-torture pling of candies being crushed, among other horrors polluting sight and sound.

Take a trip to Tokyo, though, and you’ll experience the cultural sanctity of a quiet car, where even library-whisper chatter is verboten — where an otherwise soul-sapping commute becomes a moving oasis of peace on a fast-moving metro rail. At least that’s something tourists will surely feel.

Genki Kawamura, however, plumbs the universal horrors of the subway as a purgatory of anonymity and isolation with his mind-bending psychological mystery “Exit 8.” The Japanese filmmaker adapted Kotake Create’s popular walking simulator video game “The Exit 8” for a movie that premiered at Cannes, is out now from Neon, and in theaters feels like being strapped into a Twitch stream without a player to guide you.

A blockbuster in Japan, now making waves in the U.S., “Exit 8” follows The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) who, after witnessing another subway passenger scream at the mother of a crying baby, ends up alone and adrift in an endless, labyrinthine subway passage. The only way out, and to Exit 8, is to identify “anomalies” that occur within the recurring corridors — subtle changes to advertisements or the map itself, say — the way a player would move through a walking video game whose environment keeps shifting around them.

“Exit 8” taps into the liminal space lore that’s dominated games, movies, and literature for decades, from the shifting maze growing within a house bigger on the inside than the outside in the novel “House of Leaves” to the upcoming creepypasta adaptation “Backrooms” from A24.

“More so than monsters or ghosts, something way scarier is what’s happening in the human mind and what’s happening in human memory,” Kawamura, a novelist himself, told IndieWire via translator Mikey McNamara. “Liminal spaces as a backdrop offer the opportunity to explore that. It’s like within this liminal space, we’re opening up secret doors that have things within us that we try to hide away or kept behind doors.”

Within the subway passages, The Lost Man must evade and eventually confront the rictus-grinning Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), a suit-and-tie whose perspective the film will eventually take on, too. There’s also a small boy (Naru Asanuma) who appears just as lost, and who unlocks what becomes The Lost Man’s deeply personal connection to this looping, Escher-esque environment.

‘Exit 8’Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

Kawamura sat down with IndieWire in person in New York, and I asked about his impressions of the often-chaotic New York City subway system versus Tokyo’s much more peaceful one.

“Be it New York or Tokyo, on the subway, there is this sense of togetherness because we’re sharing a space, but it’s isolated, because everyone is on their smartphones,” he said. “Both on an individual and a national level, and there’s an overlap with what’s happening. Looking at what’s on people’s smartphones, too, you would see instances of violence or wars happening, and we’ll scroll right past it without giving it a second thought. While no one on these trains or subways is directly responsible for the killing or inflicting pain [we see on smartphones], I think we’re all guilty on some level of pretending not to see some of these things. I thought, what if that guilt and those sins would manifest themselves within this corridor, and be reflected upon the people in the form of anomalies?”

He added, “In the case of ‘Exit 8,’ rather than it being a dirty, gritty, grungy subway, it’s all very clean and sanitized, white tiles. Because it felt so sanitized, it serves as a canvas to project our inner mind onto our exterior. So because it felt so sanitized, I think it serves as a canvas for us to project our inner mind onto our exterior.”

In terms of the complex set design — which looks like a facsimile of the same passage over and over but with subtle differences worming their way in — Kawamura and his team built two identical corridors for cinematographer Keisuke Imamura to follow the actors through, third- and first-person-style.

“It was a copy and paste and with a joint in the middle, linking the two corridors together. So that oner shot that you see — the super long take — we had actually done that and shot it practical. So our Walking Man, as soon as he walked past the camera, would go to the end of the corridor, get on a bicycle ride to the beginning of the other corridor, catch his breath, and then begin walking again in this very CG-animation-like manner. So that’s how we were able to, within this set and space, physically create that looping effect. So you could say it was all human-powered. I wanted to do my best not to rely on VFX and post-production trickery to create that. But because we had two identical sets, the cast and crew were getting lost and not sure where to go, so we gave the sets nicknames. The first one we called Hitchcock, and the second we called Kubrick.”

Genki Kawamura during the ‘Exit 8’ photocall at the 78th annual Cannes Film FestivalCorbis via Getty Images

Speaking of Kubrick, there’s a scene in which an inky flash flood comes rushing down the corridor toward The Lost Man in a moment that feels like the tsunami of blood coming at Wendy Torrance in “The Shining” through the walls of the Overlook.

“We had actually taken one of these corridor sets that we built and sank it into a pool, and once we had shot that, we did some touch-ups and added some effects using VFX. But I always wanted there to be sort of a practically shot base upon which we would then kind of dress up with VFX. I didn’t want to create anything from scratch using VFX only,” Kawamura said.

Released by Japan’s top distributor Toho in Kawamura’s home country, “Exit 8” has already grossed the U.S. equivalent of more than $32 million — and less than three years out from the launch of the original video game.

The success of “Exit 8” is unsurprising in a moment in which YouTube and video-game livestreaming have become an increasing resource for bankable I.P. Just look at YouTuber Markiplier‘s self-released adaptation of the video game “Iron Lung,” which he popularized via his own streams. Next up, A24 will release 20-year-old YouTuber-turned-director Kane Parsons’ “Backrooms” on the popularity of his creepypasta-inspired videos alone (and the games they’ve inspired, too).

“If you look at the video game landscape, you have your players, and you have your streamers and you have the people watching the live streams, and this multi-layered phenomenon happening in the video game world, I thought, if there was some way to capture that and put it into a movie, it would be this new type of moviegoing theater experience,” Kawamura said.

“Exit 8” is now in theaters from Neon.