A part of me wants this post to be about an Instagram pigeon who has made the subterranean Beacon Hill Station its home. But we must assign that deserving story to a post that will appear in the near future.
For now, I want to open a review of the Japanese movie Exit 8 with a description of the strange state of confusion that strikes a distracted human upon arriving, after a trip down an elevator, at Beacon Hill Station’s platforms.
If you, when the lift’s doors open, make a right and head toward the platform for trains whose last destination is Lynwood Station, you will, as you enter this section, feel a sense of dizziness because you can’t tell if you’re actually on the other platform—the one for trains heading to the Federal Way Station. Because you weren’t paying attention, because your mind was elsewhere (“Really, why are humans still going to the moon? Shouldn’t we leave that to robots like NASA’s Perseverance or Curiosity, which are, in essence, natural because they are extensions of the human social body…”) when you walked out the elevator, and you were not given Ariadne’s thread, so you instead used muscle memory for direction. And once on the platform, you can’t tell which is which: the Lynnwood section is identical to the Federal Way section.
You panic because you don’t want to step on the wrong train, so you look for some symmetry-breaking sign or mark. In one of the deepest subway stops in the US, Beacon Hill Station (its third on a list that’s topped by Portland’s Washington Park Station), that piece of information is soon found on the schedule monitor. It reads: “Lynnwood Station [arrives in] 2 minutes.” I bring all of this up because it’s connected in obvious ways with the substance of a new Japanese film, Exit 8, by Genki Kawamura.
Like The Last of Us and Fallout, this 98-minute movie is based on a video game of the same name. The film’s premise is simple, and its plot is the stuff of madness. After seeing a woman scolded on train because her baby won’t stop crying, and learning from his girlfriend that they are pregnant, a young man only identified as the Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) enters a station, 8, and looks for its exit—an exit from the news he received (and the abuse of the mother he witnessed) in the train’s car. But instead of finding the way out, he finds himself trapped in a zone that has absolutely no interest. He walks this way, and then that way, and then ends up exactly where he started. The Lost Man is in a loop. And one that is as boring as fuck. Is there a way out of this subway hell? (I have never played the video game; in fact, the only video game I can play is Galaga.)
Now back to the Beacon Hill Station. Breaking the spell of the identical platforms, one must turn to a monitor or a sign that informs you of the expected train’s destination. In Exit 8, liberation from the station’s loop requires the detection of anomalies: You are back to where you started, but is there something different here than before? If you notice something different, that recognition brings you closer to cracking this symmetrical puzzle.
Exit 8 turns out to be entertaining despite its minimal construction. The director also has an excellent sense of timing. The trick with a film of this kind is to know when you should offer something that moves the plot and how long you should remain in parts that do nothing to the plot, parts that are simply repetitive. Anyone who loves minimal techno music knows that a sudden note change after many minutes (if not an hour) of a strict loop can provide a pleasure that can even surpass that experienced by a person who has reached the peak of a very high mountain. It’s moments like this—that minor note change, that basic break in the loop—that Exit 8 reminds us that what’s interesting is not permanence, but change. Without it, we are forever stuck in the nothingness of nowhere.
See Exit 8 April 10–16 at SIFF Cinema Uptown, times vary.
