The rules of this netherworld announce themselves, early on, via a nondescript wall sign. “Do not overlook any anomalies,” it says. “If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately.” An anomaly, the Lost Man realizes, can be a visual, aural, or situational discrepancy of any kind: a light fixture tilted at a bizarre angle, a door that swings open without warning. Every time he confirms that the corridor is anomaly-free and keeps walking—or recognizes a deviation from the usual pattern and retreats in the opposite direction—he is rewarded with a marker of progress: a sign that reads “0,” then “1,” then “2,” leading, presumably, all the way up to the elusive “8.” If he makes a mistake, his progress resets to “0” and the whole Sisyphean ordeal reboots. We scarcely need reminding that “8” is an upright infinity symbol.
The Lost Man is trapped, then, in something of a hybrid puzzle: an escape room by way of a diabolical memory test. Kawamura and the production designer Ryo Sugimoto have tweaked and expanded upon the game’s spare visual elements, updating, among other objects, the wall posters where several of the trickiest anomalies lie. One poster is now a print of M.C. Escher’s “Möbius Strip II,” which depicts nine red ants marching up and down an endless loop of metal; like the strains of Ravel’s “Boléro” that play over the film’s opening and closing moments, the image is meant to place us in a suitably circular frame of mind.
These are thematically on-the-nose gestures, but Kawamura, unlike the game’s creators, doesn’t place a premium on subtlety—or, for that matter, interactivity. As audience members, we are, of course, watching the Lost Man figure out clues and then choose whether to go forward or backward, rather than making those decisions for ourselves. For all that, there’s no loss in engagement. Kawamura and Hirase seem to have perceived the immersive limitations of the movie medium—and, rather than fighting those limitations, adapted their story accordingly. What they’ve emerged with is the rare picture that feels at once true to and ultimately subversive of its source.
It wasn’t until after I’d seen Kawamura’s movie—and idly played a few rounds of The Exit 8 on my phone—that I fully appreciated the extent and nature of that subversion. Some of it has to do with the understated grace of Ninomiya’s performance as the Lost Man, whose gentleness of spirit, even under anxiety and duress, rang a distant bell. (It took me a moment to recognize him as the actor who played Saigo, an untested, good-hearted Second World War soldier, in Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima,” from 2006.) But there are other deviations as well. The Lost Man isn’t the only one who assumes control of the film’s narrative, which is divided into three chapters, each centered on a different figure. One of them is the aforementioned passerby in the corridor, known here as the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who, far from being just a phantom projection, winds up embarking on his own tragic adventure.
To reveal more would be unwise. Suffice to say that “Exit 8” toys with a variation on the Fregoli delusion, in which a person comes to suspect that the people around them constitute a single malign entity. (The concept of the Fregoli was vividly explored in Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s aptly titled “Anomalisa.”) Within the parameters of a game—where non-player characters essentially function as different disguises for, and manifestations of, a single narrative engine—such paranoia might not be unjustified. But in Kawamura’s telling, at least two of the N.P.C.s turn out to possess an individual consciousness. The effect is to nudge “Exit 8” closer to the physical, analog world, the one where the strangers around us are flesh-and-blood creatures with dreams, desires, stories, and sufferings of their own. These include the unnamed, dark-suited metro passengers we see at the start, many of whom stare silently ahead or down at their phones. Some of them, you imagine, might be playing a game of their own.
