Hallways, generally speaking, are not places you want to be in the movies. You can be just strolling down one when, all of a sudden, elevator doors open up and a river of blood comes flowing out.
They are often corridors of violence — the site of the hammer rampage of “Oldboy” or the rotating fisticuffs of “Inception” — where narrow walls buffer and condense the action. Or they can focus a character’s direction. To set Lee Marvin’s appropriately named Walker on his obsessive path in the revenge thriller “Point Blank,” John Boorman just needed to send him and his ominously echoing heels down a hallway.
But “Exit 8,” a new film by the Japanese director Genki Kawamura, is the first movie I can recall to land in a hallway, and stay there. The movie opens in first person, from the perspective of a guy on a crowded Tokyo subway. Like everyone else, he’s looking at his phone.
While he huffs and puffs his way off the train and up the stairs (he has asthma), he fumbles with his earbuds. He pauses from his music — a curiously march-like tune by Ravel — to speak to a woman on the phone. She’s in the hospital and they need to make a choice. He mumbles that he’s on his way before the line cuts out.
As he shuffles through the throngs of commuters in the byzantine underground, he turns toward signs for Exit 8. But after he passes down a hallway, he’s mystified to end up back where he started. At first he assumes he made a wrong turn, and hustles down the Exit 8 corridor again, only to, again, arrive at the same spot.
Of all the nightmarish puzzles the movies have conjured, “Exit 8” is among the most devilishly simple, and, as it turns out, metaphorically rich. Kawamura’s film is based on an indie video-game sensation, “The Exit 8,” where first-person players are ushered down a tiled metro tunnel (almost exactly like the one in the movie) and don’t escape its repeating loop until they grasp the game and make it from one level to the next.
So, yes, “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” has company. You could, realistically, enter a movie theater right now, walk down the hall, follow signs for the video-game adaptation, and stroll unaware not into the Nintendo escapade but into the Kafkaesque labyrinth of “Exit 8.”
Such a detour, I’d say, would be advisable. By its nature, “Exit 8” is sparse and repetitive. But in the not-especially-decorated annals of video game adaptations, it’s one of the most compelling and clever meldings of the two mediums — cinema and gaming — we’ve seen yet. It was an enormous hit in Japan.
The game, itself, is spartan. But while the movie keeps the game’s premise and even much of its central gameplay intact, it suffuses it with just enough backstory to expand and deepen it. Kawamura’s previous film, “A Hundred Flowers,” seen through the eyes of a woman with dementia, was also predicated by a seemingly restrictive point of view. In “Exit 8,” he levels up a bare-bones game with humanity.
Our guy’s name is never spoken. He’s credited only as The Lost Man, and played by Kazunari Ninomiya, a pop star who was a standout in Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima.” We only get a look at him once the hallway starts repeating and our perspective shifts. After going around in circles, he notices instructions on the wall: Turn back if you see any anomaly, proceed forward if you don’t.
The Lost Man begins counting every vent, door and poster (including a very fitting Escher one) along his way. Part of the trick is deciphering what constitutes an anomaly and what doesn’t. There’s a very robotic commuter who walks past every time — The Walking Man (Yamato Kôchi) — and, at one level, a boy (Naru Asanuma) in the middle of the corridor. Making it to Exit 8 may be a game, but passage ultimately hinges on seeing — really seeing — those around you.
That’s why the image that’s likely to stick with you after the film isn’t the sterile subway hallway that’s overwhelmingly where the movie resides. In this Möbius strip of a movie, it’s those first moments on the subway, when faces lit by smartphones choose not to notice an anomaly: a man shouting at a mother with a crying baby. “Exit 8” may be based on the thinnest of conceits, but bringing it into the realm of cinema means opening it to the possibility of empathy. The marching music in The Lost Man’s earbuds may be a call to arms, after all.
“Exit 8,” a Neon release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some bloody images and terror. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 95 minutes. Three stars out of four.
