{"id":654176,"date":"2026-05-06T21:59:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T21:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654176\/"},"modified":"2026-05-06T21:59:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T21:59:21","slug":"exit-8-horror-film-director-genki-nakamura-wants-people-to-break-out-of-the-loop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/654176\/","title":{"rendered":"Exit 8 horror film director Genki Nakamura wants people to break out of the loop"},"content":{"rendered":"

The feeling that the everyday world no longer makes sense is one that author and filmmaker Genki Nakamura is keenly aware of when he rides the subway in Tokyo.<\/p>\n

The labyrinthine passages of the Tokyo Metro are packed with commuters barely acknowledging each other’s existence.<\/p>\n

It’s in these spaces between locations that psychological horror film Exit 8 is set.<\/p>\n

Nakamura, who is in Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival, says the film explores the feeling of disconnection from reality.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Kazunari Ninomiya plays the Lost Man struggling to escape the supernatural hallways in Exit 8. (Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)<\/p>\n

“Most people are going around their homes and workplaces, they’re doing a loop in their daily lives,” he says.<\/p>\n

“In that loop they see violence and war in reality and in their smartphones, but they pretend not to see it.<\/p>\n

“There are a lot of people there, but they’re all looking at their smartphones, only thinking about themselves.<\/p>\n

“It’s a very unique space in Tokyo. I wanted to make the theme of the film the root of all the guilt of all urban dwellers.”<\/p>\n

In the film Kazunari Ninomiya plays a character known only as the Lost Man, who becomes trapped in an ever-looping metro station corridor, brightly lit and clean.<\/p>\n

Everything seems ordinary until he’s instructed by a metro station sign to find Exit 8, to watch for anomalies and to turn back if he sees something weird or to push on if the path looks normal.<\/p>\n

Incorrectly placed door handles, different lighting, or peering eyes on advertisements that track the Lost Man are unsettling signs of the aberrations contained within.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The signs are designed to look exactly as they appear in the Tokyo Metro, but with strange instructions such as “Do not overlook anomalies”. (Supplied: Umbrella Entertainment)<\/p>\n

It’s an adaption of the popular photorealistic video game of the same name by Kotake Create, where players must investigate a hallway on their way to the end of the station.<\/p>\n

The game itself became popular online with video game live-streamers and their audiences, a factor that was quickly noticed by Nakamura, who played the game himself and watched the stories emerge within other people’s play-throughs.<\/p>\n

“Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Super Mario, said that a good game is fun to play and at the same time \u2014 it’s fun to watch someone else play,” Nakamura says.<\/p>\n

\"The\"The The hallway as it appears in the video game Exit 8. \/ The hallway recreated in the film adaption.<\/p>\n

“What was interesting was that it was a game with very simple rules and loops, but there were different stories for each of the players.<\/p>\n

“When I decided to make the game a film, I wanted to make the movie a new state of that world.”<\/p>\n

The hallways of Hitchcock and Kubrick<\/p>\n

Nakamura said the film was shot over a month, with two identical versions of the hallway built in order to use a single physical shot to create the loop without visual effects.<\/p>\n

The cast would walk along the length of one section of the hallway, then ride a bike to the other end of the opposite hallway, catch their breath and start walking through again.<\/p>\n

Nakamura says even the crew began to lose track of where they were in those hallways.<\/p>\n

“We spent a month every day in that pure white space, we were going to go crazy and even we didn’t know where we were,” Nakamura says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“So we called the first one Hitchcock and the second one Kubrick to keep track.”<\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

The video game Exit 8 uses photorealistic graphics, which have been matched perfectly by the set designers in the film.\u00a0 (Supplied: Kotake Create)<\/p>\n

Adapting a game to film<\/p>\n

Nakamura told ABC Arts it was a worrying task to adapt the world of the interactive video game for the silver screen.<\/p>\n

“I was very scared, it was a very terrible prospect, because nobody knows how to make that kind of film, so it’s very dangerous,” he says.<\/p>\n

“When I first handed the script to the staff, they told me that there are only 16 scenes in this movie.<\/p>\n

“The staff all looked anxious and asked me how to make this into a movie.”<\/p>\n

“I told them that they didn’t have to worry, because I didn’t know what kind of movie it would be. I wanted to see something that I didn’t know how to make.”<\/p>\n

The film was selected for Cannes Film Festival and made its premiere in May 2025.<\/p>\n

It was the first time a video game adaptation was selected for the festival and Nakamura said seeing all types of audiences enjoying the movie was a relief.<\/p>\n

“When the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival \u2026 what made me happy was that there were a lot of cinephiles, a lot of filmmakers, but at the same time there were a lot of students and game fans in the same movie theatre,” he says.<\/p>\n

He hopes that eventually, like the main character, audiences will begin to look up and acknowledge the other people around them when moving through the world.<\/p>\n

“I’m hoping that watching this movie at least gives people a little bit of pause to think not getting swept away in this deluge of apathetic doom scrolling and have another think about how they spend their days.<\/p>\n

“It would be very good to see that.”<\/p>\n

Genki Nakamura will appear at Melbourne Writers Festival May 7-10. Exit 8 is now showing in cinemas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The feeling that the everyday world no longer makes sense is one that author and filmmaker Genki Nakamura…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":654177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,316369,316366,316368,30735,305753,344,316367,3975],"class_list":["post-654176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-exit-8-game","tag-exit-8-movie","tag-genki-nakamura","tag-horror-films","tag-melbourne-writers-festival","tag-movies","tag-video-game-adaptation","tag-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=654176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/654176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/654177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=654176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=654176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=654176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}