Exit 8, A psychological horror movie based on a game with the same name, was released in Japan by Toho on August 29th, 2025, and came to American theatres on April 10th, 2026. The film was directed by Genki Kawamura, who also wrote the screenplay with Kentaro Hirase.
The movie begins on a subway train, and we follow our main character, “The Lost Man,” who receives a call from his girlfriend, who informs him that he might be a father. He starts to have an asthma attack and climbs up a flight of stairs. When he calms himself down, he finds himself in a seemingly endless, repeating corridor. Through mistakes and instructions on a wall, the main character realizes that to get out of the corridors, he has to find differences in each of them and make it to the 8th exit.
The film was initially released in Japan and had the highest three-day opening for a live-action film that year. The movie sold 672,000 tickets and earned over ¥960 million (approximately $6.5 million). Globally, Exit 8 was rated very positively, with a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and ranked in the top 10 in Turkey and Hong Kong, and ranked second in Russia and South Korea. In the U.S., Exit 8 grossed $1.5 million during its opening week and was also enjoyed by many.
At Cypress, students like sophomore Becca Valdoz thought the movie had enough thriller elements, but she wishes there had beenmore jump scares. To her, the movie captured the creepiness and uneasiness of the game, and she liked how it went deeper into the NPC characters. Valdoz says, “I like how they included parts of the game we didn’t get to see, like how the NPCs got to be in the corridors.” Although she didn’t play the game herself, she still saw the videos of the gameplay and thought the movie adaptation was accurate, though it lacked the horror or thriller elements that the game had.
Sophomore Jonathan Nguyen said that the movie had a good storyline, interesting character development throughout the story, and nice use of CGI in the scenes. Nguyen thought the pacing of the movie could have been better, but he liked how the movie added the anomalies from the game to fit the film, and he also thought how the movie adapted the game was great. “I only saw a little bit of the game, and I think it was pretty good,” Nguyen said.
In Exit 8, the ending shows us that more regret comes from the things we don’t do than from the things we do. So don’t forget to take action in life wherever you think it’s needed.
