My wife and my younger son are the gamers in the family, and they've told me about it, though my wife couldn't really play it because the game action made her nauseous. My older son is a gamer too, but he games independently, while my wife and younger son usually game together. And my older son is at an age where he wouldn't really tell me about any games, or much of anything else.
In any case, as this poster succinctly encapsulates, the game involves a commuter stuck in an endless loop in a subway station, where bizarre things occur and there is no escape. That's about as much as I knew about it, except also that it was Japanese.
This poster is, of course, for a movie, not a video game. I don't generally write about video games, in and of themselves, on my movie blog, especially since I almost never play them.
I'd known about the movie almost as long as I'd known about the game. Sometime about a year ago my wife said "Here's this crazy game, and they are also making a movie." The movie played MIFF last August, and for a half a second my wife and I talked about trying to see it there, but we ultimately did not.
The movie, directed by Genki Kawamura, finally hit Australian theaters on Thursday, and I got the idea to watch it with my wife this weekend for a date night. (Plus I'm going to review it. Two birds.)
My wife liked that idea but came back with a different one: What if we take the kids?
On the surface, it seemed like a strange suggestion for a movie with the following genre categorizations on IMDB: Body Horror, Folk Horror, Monster Horror, Psychological Horror, Psychological Thriller, Action, Adventure, and just plain Horror. (Is that the most genre categorizations on IMDB? Probably not, but close.)
I did have some content concerns, though it was actually a ninth genre categorization that I thought might be the most salient: Japanese. (Is Japanese a genre? Discuss.)
To my knowledge, my kids have never seen a movie with subtitles. The closest they've come is small portions of movies that require subtitles. Like let's say there's some alien species in a Marvel movie that's speaking its own language. That might contain about a minute's worth of subtitles on screen.
A whole movie? That seemed like a bridge too far, even if the younger one and definitely the older one would have no problem with the content.
Even still we decided to put it to them, or really, to put it to the younger one, because we needn't create expectations of possibly seeing a movie in the older one if the younger one's response was going to put the kibosh on the whole idea.
Which it did. I wasn't present for it, but when my wife asked him, apparently he hemmed and hawed for a moment and decided that seemed like a lot of work for a whole movie. Fair enough.
In truth, I think everyone approaches their first foreign language movie with a little trepidation. They think reading subtitles is going to be a chore. They can't properly envision how quickly you can incorporate the reading of the subtitles into your unconscious process of watching the movie, with the result being that you miss nothing either visually or in terms of language. For sure you can't be on your phone, and it helps not to be eating something that requires your attention. But the actual viewing experience is only minimally impacted by the reading, which you and I know but which a first-time viewer might not.
Then again, for some people, this trepidation never goes away. I know a lot of adults who don't want to watch foreign language films because they think it feels too much like work.
So instead of going to the 2:10 showing of Exit 8, we went to the 8 p.m. showing -- the date night I originally envisioned, which was preceded by a yummy Thai dinner across the street from the cinema in Yarraville.
It turns out that neither the content nor the language would have been worries for our kids in Exit 8. There are a few "scary" images, but none of them involve gore. A few moments of people looking creepy and speaking in voices that are not their own, and even a cameo appearance from that mouse that had a human ear grafted to its body. But nothing they couldn't have handled.
The dialogue is fairly minimal, and fairly repetitive in nature. And some of the words are even the same. Did you know that the Japanese word for "door" is "door"? (Or something very close to that.)
But what probably would have gotten them was the boredom.
Look I'm not going to say Exit 8 isn't good. I liked it. I gave it 3.5 stars out of 5.
But the game itself is based on repetition, and even with small changes throughout, it started to try my patience after a while. I started being really critical of whether they were doing enough with the concept and providing interesting enough variations on the core narrative template. And I have to say the dark and stormy, a rum-based drink I had with dinner, was exacerbating the sleepiness I was already feeling from a busy day.
My younger son, a veteran of the game, might have given it his approval, though I suspect it might have been grudging. My older son, who had really disliked the last horror we saw with him in the theater (Steven Soderbergh's Presence, discussed here), might have been less forgiving.
So we made the right call, but not for the reasons we would have thought.
And got a great date night out of it to boot.
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