Having watched Exit 8 (now on Shudder) and Backrooms within a few days of each other, I’m ready to banish the phrase “liminal space” to vocabulary purgatory. Both films feature characters wandering through atmospherically unsettling corridors that either endless loops (the former movie) or endlessly meander through quasi-psychological labyrinths (the latter). They both seem designed to make their protagonists lose their shit, and by extension, maybe the viewers too. Exit 8 hit theaters first, though. The Japanese film debuted at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and is based on a hit video game, The Exit 8, that’s billed as a “walking simulator” and presents puzzles that are essentially an elaborate version of the spot-the-difference games you find in children’s activity books. But they both tap into existential whatnot and resemble nightmarish dreams (dreamy nightmares?), and their high-concept horror-adjacent left me shrugging but also admiring the effort put into them.
EXIT 8: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Our protagonist is an unnamed fellow dubbed the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) in the credits. He stands in a subway car doomscrolling on what appears to be ECKS DOT COM; all the other passengers are similarly zombified by their phones. Nearby, a woman’s baby wails, and a jerk near her yells at her to make the kid shut the hell up, which just makes the baby wail more. Lost Man, like everyone else, stands indifferently. He exits into the subway station and ignores a phone call from a woman, but he can’t ignore the second one. It’s his ex-girlfriend. She’s in the hospital. She’s pregnant. As our guy learns this difficult truth, he starts breathing heavy and coughing and he digs out his inhaler and takes a hit. The call breaks up before anything can be resolved, possibly because he has entered a liminal space — looks like he’ll be late for his temp job, which we should probably call a “liminal job” just to stay on theme — that exists in a parallel netherzone apparently designed to ruthlessly f— with people on some of the most difficult days of their lives. This liminal space is a real a-hole, ain’t it?
We’ve been experiencing Lost Man’s day from a first-person POV this whole time, but it suddenly shifts to third person as he wanders the station halls trying to find exit 8. He soon realizes he keeps walking through the same corridors, taking the same turns, seeing the same doors and posters and vents and lockers and trash cans and photo booths, and even the same Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) passing him in the exact same place every time. He stops to read a sign that instructs him on how to get out of here. If he notices an anomaly among the doors and posters and vents and all that, he should turn around, and if he doesn’t notice an anomaly, he should keep going. Either way, he’ll advance to the next level. Miss an anomaly and he’ll go back to level zero. Succeed this eight times, and he’ll be free! Free as a bird! Free as a bird who takes the same crappy subway to the same crappy job while staring at the same crappy crap on the same crappy phone every crappy day! Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
He learns some of the unposted rules the hard way, e.g., taking photos of the doors and posters and vents and all that won’t help, because the shots will show naught but garbledyglump. Thankfully for the sake of variety (and our sanity), the POV shifts to the Walking Man and to a mostly mute boy (Naru Asanuma) known as, of course, the Boy, who might be nicknamed the Symbolic Representation of the Lost Man’s Anxiety. Some anomalies are simple, like a doorknob out of place. Others are swiped wholesale from The Shining, but we can’t complain, because at least it breaks up the monotony of a character walking through the corridor acknowledging the doors and posters and vents and all that. Will the Lost Man ever become the Not Lost Anymore Man? Or is he just the Lost Man even when he’s not looping past the doors and posters and vents and all that, looking for exit 8? NO SPOILERS, but the answer to that is subjective anyway.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Since we’ve already referenced Backrooms and The Shining, let’s hereby acknowledge Escape Room and the cult classic ’90s puzzle flick Cube.
Performance Worth Watching: The High Concept generally doesn’t allow space for too much acting. But Kochi enjoys a few opportunities to unnerve us – or lash out in frustration, like all of us would do in that situation.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: For what it’s worth, I appreciated Exit 8 a smidge more than Backrooms — and please note the use of “appreciated” instead of “enjoyed,” because the repetition and long stretches of hallway-meandering in both films becomes maddening after a while (and I acknowledge that that’s intentional). Exit 8 is fairly tight thematically, neatly squaring the Lost Man’s new life disruption, his pending fatherhood, with the drabness of his daily routine. That’s a metaphorical liminal space in which we all find ourselves: fearing change as much as we fear being in a rut.
That’s a strong core idea for a movie that otherwise feels like it stretches its plot thin over the course of a fairly scant 95 minutes. Even the shifts in protagonists and points-of-view are just an illusion, as all the characters here are trapped in the same conundrum, the same humdrum halls in the same sets (at least Backrooms ventured into some creative, psychedelic prospective-skewing spaces). Director Genki Kawamura generates compelling literal visual metaphors for the rat race and the sensation of drowning we feel when we’re overwhelmed. The Walking Man’s story is essentially about the folly of taking shortcuts when the right way of doing things is inevitably the more difficult way.
There are some compelling themes here to match some of Kawamura’s strong filmmaking, and the resulting work is worthwhile. But we also must endure the same irritating noise whenever a character enters the main corridor. It’s either a flourish on the musical score or a sound effect, and it resembles a playground merry-go-round that needs oiling. It drove me bats. If I end up hearing it in a nightmarish dream in which I can’t escape a confounding environment (a common one, per Freud), I may file a civil suit against this movie.
Our Call: Exit 8 is a rock-solid experiment in form that deserves a slice of the acclaim Backrooms has been getting. STREAM IT, but let’s press pause on the metaphorical labyrinths of the mind for a bit, please.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
