Liminal space is scary enough without overanalyzing – and to be honest, I never once thought about what the Backrooms, or even those viral photos and videos of abandoned '80s malls, could be a metaphor for… until I watched Exit 8. The film, which serves as an adaptation of the popular Japanese video game, pulls us out of reality and into a series of unending fluorescent-lit hallways, only to make us examine our own lives from a new perspective (both figuratively and physically).
The movie stars Kazunari Ninomiya as The Lost Man, a young man who learns that his girlfriend is pregnant while smack-dab in the middle of his daily metro commute. As he begins to panic (because he is in no way ready to be a father), he becomes lost in a series of corridors that start to endlessly loop. He quickly learns that he's stuck in some kind of sadistic game. The rules are simple: each corridor has its own set of features; if The Lost Man walks through a corridor, and nothing seems out of place, he can proceed to the next one. If there is an anomaly (i.e. a doorknob where there shouldn't be, or a sudden flood of rats), he has to walk back to the corridor he came from… and if he doesn't, he finds himself back at Exit 0. The goal, of course, is to reach Exit 8.
