"Exit 8" Can't Quite Sustain Its Ambition

The past couple years have seen a bizarre video game adaptation renaissance, with TV shows like The Last of Us, and Fallout proving that there is room for serious substance in the once apparently hopeless field. Exit 8 premiered in the Midnight Screenings section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, and was just recently released domestically. It is based on the 2023 walking simulator game of the same name by Kotake Create. Given the total history of quality with video game adaptations, it’s still a cut above most of them, but I wouldn’t call it one of the best we’ve gotten in the past couple of years. 

In the film adaptation, a man is lost and trapped inside of an endless subway station loop that he must rotate through while catching, or not catching potential anomalies in the setup 8 times in a row. If he messes up, he starts over until he either succeeds, or dies trying. 

I’ve never played the game, but my rudimentary understanding of it has led me to find out it’s not very character based, focusing far more on the eeriness of the setting and the puzzle therein. The film takes a mildly different approach, and attempts to have the “Lonely Man” character as he’s referred to, go through a significant emotional arc by the time the film concludes. The pieces are laid out effectively for the most part. He’s got a partner he’s trying to get back to, there’s lots of personal stuff he’s reckoning with, and the characters he may or may not interact with along the way bring out some more vulnerable sides to him. The issue mostly arises from the film trying to have its cake and eat it too. It can’t fully commit to either being a character piece within the video game environment or being a staunch loyalist to the video game environment with a character experiencing increasingly unique elemental conflicts. 

The presentation here actually starts out very impressive. They even shoot the opener from a first person POV to really keep the aesthetics of the game in a fundamental position. Unfortunately, the repetitions that automatically come from a Groundhog Day-esque story get exceptionally grading by about the half hour mark. Not enough time passes between each round of the game for repetition to not become annoying. There’s one music cue in particular that is played every time the character enters the main hallway and sees the “Exit 8” directional sign. And when I say every time…I mean every time. 

The film also runs out of things to do visually in terms of blocking and camera movement pretty early on too, so the visuals that started off really impressive, start to become grading too. It’s a shame, because it’s clear that this is a passion project, not made for a blank check amount of money, and if the script had taken a few more leaps, this could really be something special. 

The characters themselves also have trouble getting out of their own way for a large portion of the runtime. As someone who knew nothing about the rules of this game going into the film, it didn’t take long to put the pieces together. With that said, there are more than a few incidents throughout the film where a character sabotages themselves, and resets the clock. It’s in these moments where there isn’t a clearly justifiable reason for the character to be behaving in this way aside from the inevitable padding of the runtime that needs to be done. The film clocks in at about 95 minutes, and unfortunately feels like it’s closer to two hours. 

There’s some questionable computer effect work in the final third that I was willing to overlook given the many constraints this project likely had throughout production. What did bug me about them though was the seeming lack of purpose beyond just startling the game participant. There are things that go bump in the dark, or some scary visuals toward the end here that show up almost entirely unprompted, and are really difficult to be shown as “anomalies” when they aren’t an extension of something pre-established in the environment. It’s entirely possible that they’re nods to the game, or some element to the lore that I’m not privy to, but fan service should be more well integrated into the story if that really is the case. 

All this to say if you’re a fan of the game, then you should definitely take what I’m saying here with a grain of salt. There is a high likelihood that you will enjoy Exit 8 far more than I did, because above all else it is abundantly clear that the film was made with a palpable sense of love and care for the source material.