Exit 8 (2025) Review

You know how it happens sometimes: you take a wrong turn in a subway passageway—and suddenly you can’t find your way out.
White tiles, information boards, fluorescent lights.
You walk down corridor after corridor, turn after turn, but nothing changes.
Tiles, boards, lights... no differences at all.
Even the same man with a suitcase keeps coming around the corner and ignores your attempts to talk to him.

What the hell is going on?
Tiles. Boards.
Have you gone insane, or is there something wrong with this place? And how do you escape the endless loop?
"Exit 8" seems so close...
But one tiny mistake—and hell begins all over again.

Mind the Doors Closing

An unusual film that could not have been made any other way (or made better). It is an adaptation of an experimental video game with no plot and no dialogue, where the only goal is simply to reach the end (without losing your sanity and patience along the way).

"Exit 8" begins with a long unbroken sequence that pays homage to the original and is shot from a first-person perspective—but then it starts carving out its own path. The film has only one location, four characters (none of whom even have names), and three points of view that intertwine beautifully by the end.

There is almost no dialogue in the film—and who would the Lost One even talk to? There is very little action as well. For 80% of the runtime, the Lost One simply walks forward, tries to calm panic attacks mixed with asthma, carefully examines the details of the passageway, and searches for anomalies: visual oddities that, once spotted, require you to turn around and walk back in order to move forward.

The Non-Euclidean Geometry of Escher’s Drawings

The protagonist is forced to pull himself together and rethink his life. The endless underground passage becomes the trigger for a personal transformation and the point after which his life will change dramatically. Even if he finds that "Exit 8" at the end... he will no longer be the same person. He will have to reclaim the agency that was taken from him by a life as monotonous as those endless corridors—a life of safe stability without risk or purpose.

Mentioning the other characters would be a spoiler: their appearances are surprising and add momentum to the meditative journey through a loop of the unconscious. The journey is not particularly long (the film runs only an hour and a half), but it leaves a strong impression. What frightens here are not jump scares or monsters, but the feeling of an abyss you cannot look away from. And also the terrifying sensation of being left alone with your darkest emotions.

"Exit 8" is made at a very high level, especially given such extremely limited visual means. Yes, closer to the middle you begin to notice the visual cuts when the protagonist moves from the end of a corridor back to its beginning (but how else could this be filmed?), yet that is the only real complaint. The production designers did an excellent job of translating the game's visual style to cinema; moreover, the updated version does not look much worse than real footage, making this a highly faithful adaptation of an unusual source material.

Special mention should go to the sound design (minimalistic but chilling) and the music. It was composed by Yasutaka Nakata, the creator and producer of the electronic groups CAPSULE and Perfume—in other words, an exceptionally talented musician active since the late 1990s. For "Exit 8," he created a haunting ambient soundtrack inspired by... subway noises. The unsettling two-note melody heard in the scene where the Lost One first sees another person and realizes that something is clearly wrong with this place is actually the sound signal of train doors closing. And you may not notice that right away!

Something Is Wrong...

The cast is well chosen, especially the lead actor, who has the difficult task of portraying a man who can barely breathe properly even under normal circumstances and then ends up in some kind of hell. The expressive performances complement a minimalist script that does not spell out the obvious but instead encourages reflection. It leaves behind an unusual aftertaste for a simple psychological thriller designed to create discomfort and fear through unsettling imagery.

"Exit 8" is surprisingly close to another film that came out a year later: "The Backrooms," a chronicle of wandering through an endless office where objects (and people) are not where they are supposed to be. It feels like an entire horror subgenre centered on liminal spaces is taking shape before our eyes. If you are interested in this theme and ready for even more experimentation, you can watch the completely wild "Skinamarink," filmed on a VHS camera. It is dark, terrifying, impossible to understand, with no logic or plot whatsoever—but frightening to an absurd degree. Especially when you start looking for explanations online and realize it might depict the dying consciousness of a child or the hallucinations of a comatose mind. Try falling asleep after that!

Rating: 7.5/10. "Exit 8" is a thoughtful horror film without cheap tricks, but full of endless loneliness and despair as a metaphor for the search for oneself. A good movie for a not-too-tiring evening if you want to (just a little) get your nerves tingling and think about what you are seeing. An excellent video game adaptation bordering on arthouse cinema. It may not be for every viewer, but I still recommend giving it a chance and letting the film sink in. Just do not watch the trailer under any circumstances: it reveals far too much and spoils the mystery.