Video game movies are finally coming into their own. It’s like filmmakers finally played enough games to realize why people like playing games. And while big AAA titles like Street Fighter and Resident Evil will always have the name recognition, smaller titles will need to rely on premise. We’ve just seen how Markiplier’s uber-low-budget film version of Iron Lung cleaned up at the box office. Now we have another indie horror game is arriving stateside with a trailer that looks absolutely terrifying. Please enjoy the madness of Exit 8.

The Exit 8 (the “the” often dropped colloquially) is a 2023 puzzle horror game wherein you, the player, must walk through a seemingly normal subway corridor that inexplicably repeats and repeats forever. If you see any kind of anomaly, if anything appears different on one of your walks, you must immediately go back the other way. Eventually, you find the exit. But along the way, the anomalies get scarier, weirder, and even more uncanny.

I confess to skepticism when I heard the game was getting a movie adaptation. How, after all, could a puzzle game such as this that only runs around 30 minutes turn into a feature film? Somehow, it looks like director Genki Kawamura actually pulled it off. The movie premiered at Cannes last year and did the genre festival circuit for a while. NEON has picked up the movie for US distribution, which means we’ll all get to see what looks like it understands why people like games like Silent Hill more than the makers of Return to Silent Hill do.

Exit 8 looks like a hallucinatory nightmare and that’s exactly right. It kind of makes us wonder if the infamous P.T., the playable teaser for the abandoned Hideo Kojima Silent Hills game, could make a good movie. If Exit 8 does well, maybe we’ll get to see.

Exit 8 hits cinemas April 10, 2026.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.