Review | Cannes 2025: Exit 8 movie review – live-action adaptation of walking simulator video game
Protagonist ‘The Lost Man’ must spot the differences as he walks repeatedly down an underground passage. Expect jump scares and apparitions
3/5 stars
It’s hardly every day that a novelist-turned-filmmaker will follow up an award-winning, genial family drama with a live-action adaptation of a video game.
Appropriating images and ideas aplenty from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Genki Kawamura has turned a simple premise – in which a player is made to run repeatedly down a short underground passage to search for a way out – into a psychological thriller exploring a man’s guilt and redemption.
For those who haven’t played The Exit 8, which has attained cult status among gamers since its release in 2023, fear not: Kawamura did the uninitiated a huge favour by outlining its rules on screen from the get-go.
Reading those instructions, displayed on a wall, out loud, “The Lost Man” (Kazunari Ninomiya) learns that his goal is to look for anomalies in a white, brightly lit passageway featuring simple signage, a few advertising posters, stainless steel doors and an expressionless automaton (“The Walking Man”, played by Yamato Kochi) who walks past the protagonist as if he isn’t there.
For most of the first half-hour of the film the protagonist – and the audience – try to make sense of the proceedings as he moves forwards and back through the hallway. The audience plays the same spot-the-difference game as the man while observing his increasingly agitated state, ably conveyed through Keisuke Imamura’s fluid camerawork and Sekura Seya’s editing.