Exit 8 (2025) - Genki Kawamura

In The Exit 8, the video game that inspired this fantastic movie, the player finds him or herself looping again and again through a subway hallway. The sign points toward Exit 0, but each time you loop, the sign counts up toward the actual escape, Exit 8. The player is tasked with spotting anomalies in the hallway; if there are anomalies, the player must turn back and backtrack; if they don’t, they’ll be reset back down to Exit 0 level and have to start all over again. Sometimes the anomalies are strikingly obvious and startling; other times, they’re subtle and easily missible, uncanny when you notice them. With this movie, Genki Kawamura has made what is maybe, in some ways, the most faithful video game adaptation ever. Early in the film, the main character, identified only as The Lost Man, finds a sign on the wall of this infinitely looping subway hallway that might be grabbed right out of the game, so clearly does it explain the rules of the situation. The set is also a detail perfect replication of the stark white hallway of the game, every poster and doorway and corner reproduced exactly.

But the game doesn’t really have a story and it doesn’t really have a main character; it’s just you, the player. So, Kawamura and his co-writers, Kotake Create and Kentaro Hirase, have to figure out a way to make an infinitely looping hallway interesting for an hour and a half. That makes this another rarity when it comes to video game adaptations: the movie is longer than the original game, which can typically be completed in about half that time, depending, of course, on how observant you are. And I think they’ve done a great job. While we don’t know much about The Lost Man, we get just enough details about his life outside of this subway station to make him feel like a character that’s spiritually lost well before he becomes literally so. Kazunari Ninomiya gives an excellent performance, beginning as an irritated and weary everyman and then slowly unraveling as his situation gets weirder and weirder. But the movie is smart enough to throw some curveballs. At one point, the movie suddenly shifts perspective and we find ourselves following a different character played by Yamato Kochi, who is also really excellent. It’s a surprising switch and kicks the film up into a higher level of mystery and intrigue. Kotone Hanasi is also very good when her character arrives on the scene.

But even as the movie expands its lens in this way, it never loses sight of the fact that we should feel existentially trapped in this hellish loop and it’s no spoiler to say that, despite the occasional shifts in perspectives and new character introductions, we spend fully 97 to 98 percent of the movie in this one set. I haven’t posted my review of Backrooms yet; it’s another movie that tries to find horror in mundane, but uncanny, liminal spaces and my reaction to it was also very positive. But I think Exit 8 works a bit better in the moment to moment experience. There’s a deeper lore and maybe some deeper character work in Backrooms and, interestingly enough, a lot more variation in the visuals. But Exit 8 really digs into that one hallway and, man, it really works. It’s a great environment. It’s not scary because it’s dark and shadowy, but somehow because it’s so brightly, starkly lit. There’s a knot in your stomach every time the camera approaches one of the sharp corners. The game was doubtless inspired by PT, one of the great horror games of modern times. In that game, the player is also looping through one hallway over and over again and one of the most devilish bits of design is that there’s just one turn in that hallway, one single sharp, right-angle turn. And every time you get to that corner, you dread going around it; and you flinch, just a little, every single time you do. This movie captures something of that feeling. It’s a minimalist, artistic little horror movie that just wants to unsettle you with the terror of the mundane and everyday and the idea that there might be something really horrifying lurking right there in the middle of it at any given moment. And that’s exactly what it does. It’s a great premise, but you do wonder if they can sustain it for a full feature-length film; well, they do. Like I said, in some ways this is the most slavishly faithful video game adaptation; in other ways, it’s one of the more expansive ones because it kind of has to be in order to even find a story at all. But there’s one more thing. I’m pretty sure it’s also the best cinematic video game adaptation I’ve ever seen. 4 stars.

tl;dr – easily one of the best video game adaptations, this brilliant movie is an uncanny and unsettling exploration of liminal spaces, bolstered by great performances and a great environment. 4 stars.  

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Relativity: The Special & the General Theory (1916) - Albert Einstein

The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of Relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics . . .

I make no pretence of having withheld from the reader difficulties which are inherent to the subject. On the other hand, I have purposely treated the empirical physical foundations of the theory in a “step-motherly” fashion, so that readers unfamiliar with physics may not feel like the wanderer who was unable to see the forest for the trees. May the book bring some one a few happy hours of suggestive thought!

This book grew out of an attempt by Einstein to boil down the theory of Relativity to terms understandable by a non-scientific audience and it was originally published in German in 1916. The first English translation, by Robert Lawson, was published in 1920 and that translation is still the one most English editions use, I think. It’s the one used in the Penguin Classics edition from 2006 which is the one I read. The Penguin Classics edition also features an introduction from author and physicist Nigel Calder. I often hold off on reading the introductions in some of these books because they often give away more of the story than I want them to give away, but in this case, I went ahead and read it first and I found it helpful. It kind of lays out a roadmap of what Einstein’s book sets out to do, so you’re not going in completely blind. Lawson’s translation is over a century old, but I didn’t think it felt old at all. It was a bit stilted at time, but I don’t know how much of that is due to the age of the translation or just Einstein maybe not being a great prose stylist.

As to the work itself . . . I enjoyed it a lot. I came at the book knowing only the very basic principles of Relativity and I was able to follow the majority of the book pretty well. Einstein uses a lot of concrete examples for his thought-experiments. Probably the most famous one involves the use of a train car in motion and the ways in which an observer in that train car perceives things differently from an observer standing outside the train car in a stationary location and what those differences in perception tell us about the physical universe, particularly light. And then from that he begins to extrapolate in larger and larger ways until he’s spun the principle of relativity into something large enough to address the entire cosmos. I will say that I kind of started to, in his words, get lost in the forest due to the preponderance of trees in the last third of the book. The Appendices are also pretty difficult in my opinion. But I was able to just kind of let go of understanding the specifics of the equations and try to kind of understand the ambient philosophy if you know what I mean. And the book is only, introduction and appendices included, around 160 pages, so it keeps at a pretty brisk pace and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Overall, while I didn’t understand everything in this book, I’m glad I read it as it was thought-provoking and, like a lot of great artworks, it’s interesting for the way it shows you how the mind of the creator works. It’s often very conversational in tone. At the end, it doesn’t feel like you’ve read a textbook; it feels like you’ve spent time with Einstein himself. His personality, I guess, comes across well and so feeling over my head at times didn’t overly frustrate me. I just kept coming back to his obvious passion for the subject and for communicating it. It didn’t give me a burning passion for physics or anything, but I like to get outside my normal wheelhouse sometimes and this was a pleasant, briskly paced reading experience. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – Einstein’s personality comes across in this passionate attempt to make relativity accessible; it’s still pretty difficult, but it’s short and brisk and enjoyable even if you don’t quite get it all. 3 ½ stars.

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