31 Days of Halloween: Exit 8

2025, Genki Kawamura (A Hundred Flowers) -- download

Kent saw and wrote about this way back in June. 

Like Backrooms the real horror comes from the existential dread of a strange & impossible situation. When you are lost in the woods, its not that there is actually an animal or a monster stalking you that leaves you trembling, but being in a strange situation that you are out of control of. For anyone chased by an animal in the woods, I apologize for not including you.

The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya, Gantz), who they never name, is a young guy on the subway on the way to his temp job, when he spies a salaryman berating a mother of a crying child. Like everyone else, he does nothing. He is not Hornclaw. Not long after, he gets a call from his GF -- she is at the hospital, where she has found out she is pregnant. Neither are sure what happens next, but his panicked hesitations are not reassuring for either of them. He makes his way to the exit -- is he still heading to his job, or... ?

It doesn't matter. The exit never comes. What happens is a ... game ? Something cosmically terrifying has trapped him in an endless loop. He walks the corridor, sees the same things, including another man walking in the opposite direction, only to loop around to the beginning. If he changes direction, so does the loop. Then he notices the "instructions" -- to reach the actual Exit, he has to make note of "anomalies", if he sees one, he must turn around, if none, continue forward for another loop. If he makes the right choice, he sees a number ticking up; if he makes the wrong choice, his loops are reset.

Easy enough right? For anyone playing video games, they are very very familiar with this idea. In games, you usually die, before reloading and "awakening" at an early point, having to remember what you need to do, to progress forward, before once again hitting new ground, and having to make another choice. Either each loop, The Lost Man has to judge the anomaly as to whether it actually is one, or not. Some are easy, some are... deceptive. Eventually he makes enough mistakes, resets enough time, that he is losing his mind. Not sure why; this isn't a time loop movie where you can spend a lifetime in the loop. If you did it right, you could probably do the whole 8 loops in  under and hour. Except, its not that easy.

As The Lost Man's mind frays, we switch to the perspective of The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi, The Samurai and the Prisoner), who turns out to not just be an NPC in The Lost Man's loops, but also a Main Character of his own story, his own looping conundrum. And in tow, he has The Boy (Naru Asanuma, The Night After the Divorce). We get to see him already deep in his loops, slowly beginning to come apart as he misses anomaly clues, and finally succumbing to the despair and running headlong into a false Exit, only to become the NPC that The Lost Man meets.

Despite my nature to attribute the loops to a video game, which I feel could be traversed methodically, there is the horror. The "game" doesn't want things to be easy for you; it wants you to miss anomalies, it wants you to become unhinged, to feed its own world. The Lost Man sees horribly mutated rats, he sees blood, he is engulphed in a flood.

And then there are the connections to their lives. These people are not stuck in here for random reasons; there seems to be a reason, a kind of purgatory for their failings in life. The Lost Man is hesitant about his coming child, The Walking Man was likely connected to the alluring High School Girl (Kotone Hanase, A Far Shore), an anomaly who breaks his routine. The Boy had run away from his mother. They are all tenuous plot points, not really explored but play out nicely. 

Lke Backrooms this movie is about the space inhabited. The tiles, the flickering lights (especially the ones The Lost Man doesn't notice are all scattered about, his first, and missed anomaly) the fixtures on the walls. The banality of the absolute mundane can so easily become unnerving; like a forest can become scary as soon as its not so innocent, the creaking of the trees, the cries of distant animals (BTW, that usual scary cry? its a fox).

Like Kent, I really enjoyed the movie. And yes, it was, in fact, based on a video game.