The Fate Of Ophelia

My thoughts on Exit 8 and Hamlet

Although Kawamura Genki’s Exit 8 is indeed a film based upon a 2023 video game, let me hasten to assure you that it could not be more further removed from the hyperkinetic excesses of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and other movies of a similar ilk if it tried. Instead, it is a decidedly low-key existential horror film that begins with an extended unbroken shot following the commute of a young man (Ninomiya Kazunari), unnamed but dubbed the Lost Man for reasons that will soon become abundantly clear, as he journeys to his temp job, a trip that finds him studiously ignoring an irate businessman loudly berating a young mother over her crying infant and taking a call from his ex-girlfriend, who informs him that she is pregnant and unsure about what to do next. Departing from his train, he makes his way through the station but is suitably distracted enough that it takes him a few minutes to realize that he seems to be walking through the same lonely stretch of passage over and over again. Eventually he notices a sign on the wall that informs him that he is required to go through this particularly stretch of tunnel and notice any anomalies that in anything from the signs on the wall (including a poster for a M.C. Escher exhibition, ho-ho) to the behavior of another person, dubbed the Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears to be stuck in a similar loop. If he catches every single one, it will presumably lead to his escape but if he misses any, he goes back to the beginning. As the Lost Man continues to search for a way out of his predicament, he comes across a high school student (Hanase Kotone) who is convinced that she is in some form of Hell and a young boy (Nauru Asanuma) who just might provide the Lost Man with the key to his salvation.

As someone who is not a gamer by any stretch of the imagination, I cannot say with any degree of certainty just how closely Exit 8, which Genki co-wrote with Kentaro Hirase, compares to its source material, though I suspect it probably comes closer to that goal than most other films inspired by video games have in the past. (I am certain that by the time you see this review, you can go online and find the similarities and differences explored with the kind of granular attention to detail once reserved for the Kennedy assassination.) Taken strictly on its own terms, it is a largely intriguing example of what the kids these days are referring to as “liminal horror”—a subgenre that uses spaces as empty malls or hallways that are so familiar that even the tiniest “off” element can prove unnerving—and while it is a form of storytelling that might not prove to be everyone’s cup of tea, Genki does a good job of mining its premise for some low-fi chills while putting us squarely into the shoes of the increasingly hapless Lost Man, scanning the walls right along with him in the hopes of picking up the latest differences. Perhaps inevitably, the film gets a little less interesting during the moments when it makes the occasional stabs towards traditional narrative, particularly in the way that the Lost Man’s relationship with the kid he comes across too overtly mirrors his own ambiguous response to the possibility of becoming a father, and it doesn’t quite stick the landing in the final moments. For the most part though, Exit 8 is certainly unusual and while I am not sure that “entertaining” is quite the word to describe it, it really is like nothing out there at the moment and those in the mood for something that prefers to be quietly creepy rather than constantly in your face with “BOO!” moments and excessive gore may find it to be a unique and mostly fascinating experience

.On the other hand, if you prefer something slightly more familiar than the likes of Exit 8, there is Hamlet, Aneil Karia’s adaptation of the William Shakespeare drama with which I will assume you have some degree of familiarity. That said, this is not a traditional rendering of the tale by any means as Michael Lesslie’s adaptation gives it a modern-day setting and makes large cuts to the original text, some of which will not be missed and some of which will no doubt raise eyebrows amongst fans of the Bard. Here, Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) is the son of a powerful and recently deceased real estate developer (whose holdings include a lavish property known as El Sinore) who is still grieving his father’s passing when he a.) learns that his Uncle Claudius (Art Malik) intends to marry his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) with unseemly haste and b.) encounters the ghost of his father (Avijit Dutt), who informs him that he was murdered by Claudius. This news sends him into a spiral of indecision that soon festers into madness that threatens to drag down anyone in his orbit, particularly Ophelia (Morfydd Clark), the former love of his life who cannot understand Hamlet’s new coldness and cruelty to her. If you know the story, you know where this is going and if you somehow don’t know, fe be it for me to ruin it for you.

Lord knows I have seen many screen adaptations of Hamlet, both traditional and modern-dress—among the latter are Michael Almereyda’s fascinating 2000 take (with Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue amusingly set in the “Action” section of a Blockbuster) and, technically, the Bob & Doug McKenzie epic Strange Brew—and this particular is a particularly mixed affair. On the one hand, some of the elements on display here do work—Ahmed delivers an undeniably powerful take on the main role, some of the updates are inspired (particularly reconceptualizing the show presented by the Players denouncing Claudius as a murderer as a Bollywood-style dance and the startlingly visceral manner in which the murder of Polonius (Timothy Spall) is presented) and there is the intriguing (though not fully developed) suggestion that perhaps Claudius’s guilt of his brother’s murder is merely a manifestation of Hamlet’s own tortured psyche. On the other hand, there are a number of major cuts and eliminations—particularly the deletion of the key character of Horatio, whose function is given to Ophelia and her brother Laertes (Joe Alwyn), and Ophelia’s mad scene—that only serve to muddy matters that were once presented with crystal clarity. While the “To be. . .” soliloquy did make the cut, it is presented in such a bizarre manner—Hamlet screams the whole thing out while speeding through the night in his car while seen only in profile—that it takes one of the most sure-fire scenes in the history of drama and comes perilously close to making it a throwaway bit. Additionally, while the multi-cultural approach is a nice touch, presenting contemporary big business as a contemporary equivalent for the kingdoms, feuding families and power plays Shakespeare once wrote about is not a particularly fresh concept at this point and the film doesn’t bring any new observations to the table in this regard. Although not without its merits (in addition to Ahmed, Morfydd Clark is quite good in her truncated turn as Ophelia), this proves to be a version of Hamlet that has some ambitions, to be sure, but doesn’t quite know how to pull them off successfully enough to warrant a look.