‘Exit 8’ review: Kotake Create’s video game becomes a less-captivating film

“Game over” really means “over and over and over,” since we always have an urge to play again. Movie versions of video games lack that interactivity, hoping your fondness for character and scenario are enough. It also might just be a mercy.

But the Japanese film “Exit 8” from director Genki Kawamura, based on the scare-adjacent loop puzzle game that became a sensation a few years ago, has in mind a movie experience that’s truly like playing. It wants you to feel that nightmare scenario of being stuck, but it also wants to be meditative. It’s not always successful at merging those experiences — as experimentation it falls short, and the horror label is also a stretch — but it ultimately earns a liminal fascination as it fuses your perspective to the protagonist’s.

The game, designed by Japanese artist Kotake Create, drops you into a white-tiled subway corridor that you’ll encounter again and again until the keys to unlock the title escape are deduced. Before the movie reaches that space, however, it uses a long POV shot to introduce us to an anonymous, earbud-shielded passenger (Kazunari Ninomiya), one of many commuters transfixed by his phone to distract from daily monotony. (His music of choice? Foreshadowing alert: Ravel’s insistent, crescendo-ing “Boléro.”)

Then he reluctantly answers a phone call from his ex-girlfriend as he’s making his way up from underground and she tells him she’s pregnant. His hesitation indicates one more desire to avoid reality, but when he begins to grasp that he’s repeating the same stretch of hallway — same posters (one cheekily displaying artist M.C. Escher’s Mobius strip), same emotionless businessman walking by. It dawns on him that he’s in a new, bizarre, just-for-him reality, and he won’t see daylight until he can spot the anomalies in each go-round.

The movie calls him the Lost Man, a bid for everyman philosophical relevance, and Ninomiya is indeed a sympathetic avatar. Kawamura, who wrote the screenplay with Kentaro Hirase, also gives some background to that walking businessman, along with introducing the Boy (a compellingly enigmatic but still cute Naru Asanuma), whose importance is another attempt to add an emotional contour to how the Lost Man comprehends his predicament.

But mostly, as each “level” is reached or not, you’ll want to play along and clock the differences (many obvious, some not), even if the pacing occasionally works against the suspense. One can understand why Kawamura would preserve the game’s walking-simulator vibe with patient Steadicam shots that follow, lead and circle the player(s), as if real time were an essential element to the atmosphere.

But the spare use of cutting in key moments can be a drag — when your brain is working faster than the movie, that’s a problem. As for the attempts here at horror, it’s better when the aura is creepy instead of overt. Then again, there aren’t a whole lot of ways to disrupt the mood in a fluorescent-lit corridor, especially when the goal is to keep moving.

With its bed made just so, “Exit 8” has a refreshing ambition: It wants to be both a purgatory and an advancement in form. When it smoothly moves between the two, it feels like a singular commentary on life’s deceptive banalities. But it also means you’ll be relieved to know that when it’s over, it’s really over.