skybridge

koberulz.bsky.social · @koberulz.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Exit 8 6/10

I watched this via the Letterboxd Video Store, which offers it with the original Japanese dialogue and no subtitles. Unfortunately, this meant I missed the bulk of a couple of conversations—one at the start, one about two thirds of the way through—that set the emotional throughline of the film. I felt I was getting the gist of them via Google Translate's live transcription option, but it turns out I was not. Google offered “The baby is done” for what was apparently supposed to be “I'm pregnant,” whereas I took it to mean either “the baby is dead” or “I've just finished giving birth,” the latter being more likely given she was in a hospital and at least one baby was audibly crying. Thankfully, most of the rest of the film really doesn't need any dialogue, and most of it (counting small numbers of things) was actually within my own rather limited Japanese vocabulary. I'm not sure if this is the reason I felt the narrative padding was the weakest part of the film or not; I wasn't really moved to re-evaluate it in light of reading the Wikipedia plot summary and learning what the conversations were, but that's also not the same as experiencing the actual conversations within the context of the film. It seems like it does both too much and too little. Honestly, “dude (Kazunari Ninomiya) is trapped in a seemingly malevolent subway tunnel, but with clearly laid-out rules for his escape” is a decent premise on its own without all the emotional weight added. But once they switch perspective to the walking man (Yamato Kochi) and cast him as someone also trapped inside the loop, rather than simply a mirage it casts, it starts going off the rails. Throwing in the boy (Naru Asanuma) ties directly to the emotional arc it wants the lost man going on, but otherwise weighs down the film and raises way too many questions about how this works or why he's there (or who he is...he's implied to be the lost man's son but is first connected with the walking man and the lost man shows no sign of recognition). I've never had much interest in watching live streams of gamers gaming, but where this works is hitting a lot of the same spots I imagine those hit, drawing the viewer into the game almost as though they were playing it themselves. I was almost entirely unfamiliar with the game before watching the film—I'd seen a single speedrun that floated across one of my social media feeds and lacked enough context to figure out what the hell was going on—but the movie neatly lays out all the rules almost immediately (after giving the lost man a couple of minutes to wander through the loop and begin to panic) and it was very easy to immediately begin trying to spot the anomalies before the lost man did, figuring out whether he should go forward or backwards, getting excited when he seemed to get it right, frustrated when he seemed to get it wrong, and confused when the film's universe came to an unexpected ruling.

#movie

Published 2026-07-01 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere