Review: The Film, Exit 8…

Liminal spaces. Yeah, I had to look the term up too. Broadly speaking, they are physical, emotional, or metaphorical places of transition—a “threshold” between two states that can feel empty, surreal, or unsettling when ordinary activity disappears. Films such as The Shining (1980), Cube (1997), and The Backrooms (2026) explore this idea, often with pretty terrifying results.

But does that mean every film about liminal space is automatically a horror film? And what, exactly, makes the idea so unsettling?

Exit 8 (2025), directed by Genki Kawamura (Monster) and adapted from the 2023 video game, finds its tension in a transition that never seems to lead anywhere. Just before entering a Tokyo subway station, The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya, Letters from Iwo Jima) receives a call from his ex-girlfriend, who tells him she is pregnant. Overwhelmed by the news, he soon finds himself trapped in an endless, sterile corridor. To reach Exit 8, he must follow three rules: if he notices an anomaly—anything strange or out of place—he must turn back immediately; if nothing seems unusual, he can continue forward; and if he makes a single mistake, he returns to the beginning. Much of the film’s appeal comes from watching him move through this strangely repetitive space, overlook small details, encounter others, and slowly learn from his mistakes.

Like the game, the film uses its looping Tokyo subway corridor to explore personal accountability, emotional avoidance, and fatherhood. For the Lost Man, who has just received life-changing news, the space gradually becomes transformative. The endless tunnel is more than a supernatural trap; it echoes his inability to move forward emotionally. Before entering the station, he watches a passenger berate a woman with a crying baby and does nothing, a small but revealing moment of avoidance. The tunnel’s anomalies then seem to draw on his guilt and anxiety, from lockers carrying the sound of a crying baby to uneasy encounters with silent figures.

During his journey, the Lost Man encounters two other figures: the Walking Man and the Boy. The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi, The Hitman and the Prisoner) serves as a cautionary figure, seemingly trapped by earlier failures and his own apathy. The Boy (Naru Asanuma, The Night After the Divorce), meanwhile, suggests both innocence and the future child awaiting the Lost Man outside the tunnel. Rather than focus only on his own escape, the Lost Man begins protecting the Boy, even guiding him through dangers such as a sudden flash flood. By accepting responsibility and confronting his fear of fatherhood, he finally reaches Exit 8. Back in the real world, he calls his ex-girlfriend and agrees to meet her at the hospital. When another passenger causes a disturbance on the train, he turns around and intervenes—a small but meaningful sign that he is no longer willing to look away. 

Unlike the video game, which leaves the player almost entirely alone aside from a passing businessman, the film introduces several figures who reflect the Lost Man’s failures and anxieties. In that sense, the subway tunnel begins to resemble a kind of karmic purgatory, shaping its anomalies around his habit of avoiding difficult situations. A baby’s cry from inside lockers, for instance, quietly echoes his fear of parenthood and responsibility. The Walking Man offers a darker variation on that pattern: a former victim of the loop, he remains trapped by his apathy, alcoholism, and abuse after following the False Stairs Anomaly, a deceptive exit marked by a hidden zero. The film also complicates time within the corridor. In one timeline, the Lost Man abandons the pregnancy, leaving his ex-girlfriend to raise their child alone; the Boy later enters the loop carrying his own childhood guilt. Together, these details make the tunnel feel less like a neutral puzzle and more like a space where avoidance keeps returning in different forms.

The Lost Man enters the loop just after learning that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant, and his inability to move forward without making the right choice reflects his anxiety and emotional unpreparedness for fatherhood. The film opens on a crowded train, where passengers ignore a mother struggling with a crying baby—a moment of collective inattention that quietly sets the moral tone. From there, the loop begins to feel both like a punishment and a test of his tendency to look away when others need help. Its sterile, repeating white-tile corridor also evokes the numbing routines of urban life, smartphone distraction, and late-capitalist exhaustion. Read this way, the hallway resembles Naraka, or karmic purgatory, where escape depends on awareness and right action. The number eight may likewise evoke the Buddhist Eightfold Path and the possibility of breaking free from samsara, the cycle of suffering and rebirth.

A handful of recurring motifs help tie the film’s ideas together: the anomalies, the loop and counter, the Businessman and the Boy, and the Lost Man’s dwindling supplies. Small distortions in the hallway—a baby crying from inside the lockers or a face that looks subtly wrong—seem to give shape to The Lost Man’s guilt and earlier failures. Even the basic rule of turning back when something is wrong and moving forward when everything appears normal turns decision-making into a literal maze. The Walking Man hints at a kind of trapped conformity, while the Boy suggests innocence, intuition, and the willingness to notice—and respond—when something is wrong. Meanwhile, the Lost Man’s shrinking water supply and asthma inhaler add a practical urgency, grounding the film’s abstract supernatural purgatory in ordinary human vulnerability.

Reviewers tend to praise the film’s existential unease, minimalist style, eerie sound design, and the way its camera encourages viewers to search for anomalies alongside the protagonist. The looping subway also works as a fairly direct metaphor for modern routines, dead-end cycles, and the anxiety of an approaching life change—in this case, parenthood. Fans of the game have generally appreciated how the adaptation carries its first-person perspective, liminal horror, and rules-based puzzle mechanics into a feature-length film. The main criticism is that such a spare concept can begin to feel repetitive across a roughly 90-minute runtime, with some reviewers suggesting it might have worked better as a short film. Others point to the obvious debt to The Shining, including a Jack Torrance-like progression, as well as a late shift toward more heavy-handed treatment of the protagonist’s estranged, pregnant ex-girlfriend. For some viewers, the slow pace and strict game logic deepen the Möbius-strip nightmare; for others, they simply make the walk feel a little too long.

Since I had to Google “liminal space,” I’m especially interested in how Exit 8 makes the concept memorable. Rather than treating the looping Tokyo Metro corridor as a conventional haunted space, the film turns it into an outward expression of the Lost Man’s emotional paralysis after he freezes during a phone call about his ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy. Its anomalies—including a baby crying from inside lockers—echo the responsibilities he has spent his life avoiding. The loop also resembles a spiritual trial, drawing on Dante’s Inferno and the Buddhist idea of Naraka, while the number eight suggests both the Eightfold Path and infinity. Escape requires breaking that cycle of apathy. The trapped child finally pushes him beyond self-preservation and into a paternal role; he leaves the loop only after choosing responsibility and protecting another life. In this sense, the threshold becomes not a place of endless transit, but one of moral change.

Genki Kawamura turns a minimalist walking simulator into a psychological and spiritual study of guilt, apathy, and responsibility. The looping subway tunnel resembles a modern Naraka, or Buddhist purgatory, while Exit 8 evokes the Eightfold Path out of samsara. The Lost Man remains trapped until he stops ignoring suffering and chooses empathy over self-preservation. His earlier refusal to help a mother and baby on the train establishes that moral failure, and the sterile tunnels extend it into a broader image of social tunnel vision. Where the game rewards strict attention to anomalies, the film reframes looking away from uncomfortable truths as an ethical failure.

The recurring phone call and the Lost Man’s fear of fatherhood make that test personal. The Boy may represent his unborn child, his abandoned inner child, or—if the station operates outside linear time—his future son, turning the journey into a choice between responsibility and repeating the cycle of absence. The Walking Man offers the darker alternative: a previous traveler who failed, gave up, or took a false shortcut. Instead of escaping, such figures become part of the station itself, absorbed into its repeating architecture.

All in all, Exit 8 is memorable, though not especially frightening. For me, a true horror film is one that scares you so thoroughly that a single viewing feels like enough. By that definition, Exit 8 does not quite qualify. Its real strength lies in turning a liminal space into a kind of purgatory—a recurring trial the Lost Man must complete before he can move forward. I would still recommend it, with one caveat: don’t approach it expecting conventional horror. It works better as a thoughtful, allegorical study of guilt, responsibility, and change.