Bob saw the movie Exit 8.

From its earliest days, the video game industry has compared itself to—and drawn inspiration from—the film industry, often with an inferiority complex. That complex is misplaced, given how different the two media are, not least in what they ask of the audience: attention and passivity for cinema, focus and participation for video games. The gap is so wide that crossings from one world to the other have rarely been convincing: we’ve had countless bland game adaptations of hit movies, and just as many cinematic turkeys riding the popularity of some game or other. Bob has occasionally discussed these attempts—whether a legendary so-bad-it’s-good flick like Street Fighter (1), a tie-in like Super Mario Bros. (2), or a work that draws on gaming worlds while trying to remain a film: Pixels (3).

Whether it’s Doom, Silent Hill, Prince of Persia, or any other gaming IP, the film adaptations born from our little microcosm have invariably remained mere tie-ins, thoroughly ignored by the big names in cinema. But—and as far as Bob can remember, this is a first—Exit 8: The Movie (4) has a distinction: it was selected for the Cannes Film Festival (Midnight Screenings) and is getting good notices from the “failures” of cinema (5)—the critics… okay, promise, Bob will stop trolling!

The Exit 8 is an indie game from late 2023 that quietly turned into a classic—Bob talked about it a few months back (6). Sitting somewhere between the uncanny and a puzzle game, it has you escape an apparently endless subway corridor by spotting anomalies. Flip the 8 on its side and you get the infinity symbol ∞—sometimes, somewhat improperly, called a lemniscate. It’s a simple concept that proves highly fun in practice. The brisk hour it takes to beat The Exit 8 is an experience every game lover should treat themselves to. But is that concept enough for a 90-minute movie? The trailer, at least, hints at a fairly faithful adaptation on the visual front…

Practically speaking, after what snobby cinephiles like to call a “first-person long take”—i.e., matching the game’s POV—the camera pulls back to follow the protagonist played by Kazunari Ninomiya (7), a major star in Japan thanks to the boy band Arashi (currently on hiatus), yet largely unknown abroad despite a strong turn in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima nearly 20 years ago. The rest of the cast—two women, one man, and one child in total!—are lesser-known faces, even in Japan. And producer/director Genki Kawamura (8)? He’s very well known in Japan, a veteran with a deep slate in pop culture, especially anime. In France, I’d say the works of his that are best known are Your Name. and Suzume.

With a seasoned producer and a celebrity lead, Exit 8 set itself up for success. Add a very faithful production design and solid VFX, and I think you’ll agree the audience isn’t being shortchanged. So, does Exit 8 work as a film? Meh… not really. To be blunt: much like Alita: Battle Angel back in the day (9), the movie only really has value for viewers who didn’t spend that tight, playful hour with the game The Exit 8. For everyone else, there isn’t much here: the anomalies, though faithfully reproduced, no longer carry the thrill of discovery, and trying to script what is fundamentally a sensory experience is, in my view, a miss.

Because Exit 8 has no explanation—and it shouldn’t have tried to provide one. Did David Lynch ship Mulholland Drive with a study guide? No! And yet that film became a classic. Kawamura tries to explain the anomalies as the hero’s fear of fatherhood; multiple clues tell the audience it’s all in his head (a glimpse through the side door, and the mice with a cloned ear the protagonist sees on his smartphone before the anomalies, among others). The aside about “the man who walks” shows how a bad father—he apparently rarely sees his son, and he’s not attentive even when the boy points out the anomalies—ends up trapped in the corridor and dehumanized. One anomaly created for the film (Bob counted four) features a baby abandoned in a train-station locker, and the hero breaks out of the loop and frees himself by sacrificing himself for his son in the final scene… Convoluted as it is, the scripting is a bit too heavy-handed to genuinely add anything to the film. Add to that some insipid dialogue…

As for the direction, there isn’t much to fault; the handful of new anomalies even inspired the game’s creator to add five more—three taken from the film—(10), giving the work enough fresh life to justify a Switch 2 port (11). For completeness, one “innovation” did backfire on Kawamura: turning a The Shining–style blood wave into a tsunami sparked a minor controversy in Japan (12), a country still marked by the 2011 Tohoku disaster.

So what’s Bob’s conclusion? Since I got a bit bored during the movie, it’s hard to recommend it wholeheartedly. If you haven’t played the game and you enjoy a fantasy-tinged horror vibe, go see it—just don’t bother trying to read too much meaning into Kawamura’s uninspired scripting. And if you’ve already played Exit 8, try Platform 8 instead!

Bob Dupneu