A man trapped in a endless sterile subway passageway sets out to find Exit 8. The rules of his quest are simple: do not overlook anything out of the ordinary. If you discover an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you don’t, carry on. Then leave from Exit 8. But even a single oversight will send him back to the beginning. Will he ever reach his goal and escape this infinite corridor?
What We Thought:
I can’t tell you if I fully grasped the meaning of Exit 8, but I thought it was an interesting watch and it gets points for originality. For the bulk of the movie it’s a single location, limited character film and it never wanders because of that. Do I get the existential meaning behind it? Probably not.
It opens with a commuter on a train. The train is packed and a baby starts crying. Another passenger loses it on the mother for allowing the baby to cry and everyone else keeps their eyes on their phones and Earbuds turned up. The commuter listens in, but ends up getting off the train. There he gets a call from his recent ex-girlfriend telling him she’s at the doctor and she’s pregnant. She doesn’t know what she wants to do about it and he says he’ll be there and starts walking through the train station.
And he continues to walk through the train station. He gets stuck in a time loop and has to figure out what, if anything, changes in the hallways as he tries to get to Exit 8. There are posters on the wall, multiple doors, lockers and a photobooth. There’s a random man walking he can’t interact with and then eventually a young boy. The film follows the man as he tries to go from hallway to hallway, floor to floor, figuring out if it’s ok to continue or head backwards because of an anomaly.
All that is fine, but it gets into the walking man, the young boy and a woman as well who probably mean more to it than I understood. I get who the kid is supposed to refer to, but the walking man substory made no sense to me. Either something is lost in translation or it went over my head (or both).
The actor who plays the lead character is solid. He holds your attention throughout Exit 8 even if I didn’t quite get it. By the end you sort of get what the time loop represents, but I totally missed what the other people meant. It’s just different enough to watch and just short enough to hold your attention throughout. Another 15-30 minutes and it would have really lost its audience. If you want something different, give it a try.
The Nerds Templar 