A Spoiler Review
I started comparing this movie to Backrooms pretty soon after it began. Now that the credits have rolled, I think Exit 8 worked for me in a way that Kane Parson’s debut feature didn’t. Here’s what I think.
Exit 8 was driven by a clear narrative purpose. From the first 10 minutes, you understand the setup. The protagonist is stuck in a looping subway hallway, and he needs to get out. It gives him rules to follow–look for anomalies, turn back if you see one, continue if you don’t. It’s engaging to participate in the game, because these are rules we as the audience can also follow. There are several moments of dramatic irony where we notice something that the protagonist doesn’t. It could have done a bit better of a job at rewarding visual scrutiny, but maybe I’d need to rewatch to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
That drive isn’t really present in Backrooms in the same way, which may have contributed to my dissatisfaction with it. As others have pointed out, Backrooms has a three-part structure that is somewhat redundant. The first part follows Clark’s initial expedition into the Backrooms. During this section, we explore with him. His discoveries are ours. In the second part, Clark has mapped out a solid chunk of the space, and recruits his employees to help him make some documenting evidence. In this section, Clark’s knowledge of the Backrooms exceeds ours, so we sort of follow the employees’ POV, and retread old ground. Then, in the third part, we follow Mary, his therapist, as she explores the Backrooms for the first time. We get all the same initial shock at entering the space, exploring the initial room, etc. We’re much further ahead of what the POV character knows in the last section.
Exit 8 also has a three part structure (even more explicitly than Backrooms, as it turns out). However, this structure doesn’t suffer from the same repetition, despite the repetitive nature of the premise. Even when we switch from the protagonist’s to the walking man’s POV, our understanding of the cyclical hallway and its tricks increases. We never see the same anomalies twice. And the change in POV itself is a revelation about the nature of the space. The final POV switch, to the boy, reunites us with the protagonist and develops their relationship. Even though the entire movie consisted of walking through the same hallway, I never felt like Exit 8 was retreading old narrative ground.
There was a straightforward thematic through line in Exit 8. The narrative addresses cycles of absentee fatherhood. The story doesn’t treat this subject in a great deal of depth, but there’s a clear trajectory to the story. The protagonist grows over the brief runtime, and takes the courage necessary to be a father (by implication). The connection between the thematic material and the setting is pretty loose in Exit 8. The best connection I can make is that absentee fatherhood is, like I said, cyclical in nature. But that’s pretty much the beginning and end of that analogy.
Backrooms also talks about cycles–mental ruts that you dig yourself into, in spite of yourself, through habit and routine. It’s an interesting overlap between these two films that might be worth exploring in more detail. That aside, this theme is pretty heavy-handed in Backrooms. Narratively, the Backrooms themselves primarily serve to reinforce this conceit. They’re sort of a physical manifestation of what’s going on in Clark’s–and Mary’s–lives.
I got less of that sense of heavy-handedness with Exit 8. The setting was interesting, and the movie got a good deal out of it. It was the primary focus of the movie. There was the thematic element of fatherhood, but like I said, the thematic connection to the setting was pretty loose. It felt like they chose to tell this particular story in the Exit 8 scenario, but they didn’t create the Exit 8 scenario simply to illustrate their thematic material.
I enjoyed both movies. They were both pretty stylish in their own ways. I think I preferred a lot of the cinematography of the Backrooms to Exit 8’s, but the title design and sound design of Exit 8 were excellent.
They’re both worth watching for sure. They have a lot of interesting thematic similarities.