Well, eventually you just have to watch the worst movie of the festival. Thankfully, I got this out of the way on the first day. Exit 8 is based on a video game, so I hear, that streamers like to speedrun on Twitch and YouTube. The gist is that your character is stuck in the middle of Tokyo’s rail system, trying to find his or her way through the eponymous Exit 8, which keeps repeating over and over until the player solves the building puzzles of the game. This live-action take on it is basically just that, except it also wraps in an increasingly ugly plot about how the central character has to find his way to the local hospital where his ex-girlfriend is pregnant with his child and he must determine whether they should carry through with the pregnancy.
I’ll take these two strands one at a time. As a video game adaptation, it starts off… I won’t say promisingly… but I was at least intrigued enough to see how each level of progression manifested, how every little change gave way to further discovery by the central cipher… uh, I mean character. But eventually, once you’ve walked with this guy down the same hall the first fifteen times, the next fifteen begin to feel like an exercise in a specific kind of torture. By the time we were nearing the third act, I was about ready to give up state secrets.
There’s an attempt to liven this endless monotony up by shifting perspectives over to other characters who have been trapped in the same loop, but by doing so, this actually confuses the issue. One could argue that what the lead character, known as “The Lost Man,” is on some kind of metaphorical journey of growth and that once he finds his way out, he’s attaining a new level of adulthood/responsibility/whatever, but put another character into this same maze and suddenly it’s just some kind of sick game run by a higher power that we neither see nor learn anything about. This creates further questions about why we’re bothering with any kind of overall plot for The Lost Man at all, if in the end, it’s all just magic anyway.
Speaking of which, at a certain point, Exit 8 takes a hard and unwelcome turn into an avenue that’s clearly pushing hard in a pro-life direction. The script hinges on the idea that The Lost Man must choose whether or not his ex keeps the baby, which is of course insulting on its face, but once we learn that so much of the story seems to actually center on how much he stands to lose if his ex (who also must be his ex for a reason, but I digress) terminates that pregnancy, the sour taste really starts to thicken. I realize that Japan is deep in the midst of a population crisis, but I don’t think propaganda hidden within the confines of a video game interpretation like a Trojan horse is really the way to go about solving it. That eventual resolution just made me resent the thing all the more. Also, the CGI looks like crap.