Most people carry on their daily routine without thinking much about it. You march forward to your daily job by driving a car or taking the subway. What if you are stuck in a subway station and can't get out? Even worse, what if you keep repeatedly seeing the same path without ever getting to your exit? That is the endless nightmare of "Exit 8," a frequently terrifying film experience that proves to be unnerving and leaves you in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Kazunari Ninomiya is The Lost Man, a young guy who listens to Ravel's Bolero on his phone while riding the subway, canceling the noise of a crying baby and the sole male passenger who is yelling at the mother holding the baby. After declining a couple of calls from his ex-girlfriend, she hits him with the news that she's pregnant. Our Lost Man has asthma and starts coughing as she asks him what to do. As he is walking through the subway corridor to Exit 8, he loses the phone signal and finds that the corridor is endless as he walks the same section of a corridor with the same wall ads that keep repeating. He sometimes sees an older ponytailed man walk right past him who doesn't acknowledge our confused young asthmatic. Sometimes the older man, known in the credits as the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), appears and stands with a frozen smile looking at our Lost Man. As the Lost Man continues through the corridors, a set of instructions appear on the wall indicating that if there are any anomalies, he must turn back or he will never make it to Exit 8, the freedom exit from this nightmare.
I cannot divulge much more about "Exit 8" (adapted from a Japanese video game by co-writer and director Genki Kawamura) because there are devilish surprises along the way. Sometimes the same corridor has unexplained anomalies like an upside down 8 on the exit sign, sometimes the lighting changes and, in one spookier-than-thou moment, the lights go out and slithering creatures can be heard and only barely seen. We also see a bunch of lockers and a photo booth along the same corridor and, in one of the scariest anomalies, a crying baby can be heard inside a locker! "Exit 8" is a sublimely thrilling exercise in terror, accentuated with humanity (a young boy frequently appears that leads to the Lost Man having benign visions of a potential future family enjoying the ocean) and with allusions to Japan's past real-life disasters (when you hear a siren at one point, you'll know immediately what it signifies). There is a fruitful morality to this tale that rises above just the frenetic experiment of pure anxiety. Make no mistake, though - if you already suffer from panic attacks or any deep anxiety, don't watch this powerful movie.
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