A producer who keeps choosing stories about people who cannot make up their minds, and who has now started directing them himself. Exit 8 shows he can frighten with a white-tiled corridor, and that he does not yet trust it to speak for itself.
Fi1m perspective
A man on a crowded Tokyo train, earbuds in, takes a call from his partner asking whether he wants the child she is carrying. He does not know. At the far end of the carriage a stranger is screaming at a mother whose baby will not stop crying, and nobody looks up, our man included. That is the opening of Exit 8 (2025), which Genki Kawamura directed and wrote with Kentaro Hirase, and it is the plainest statement we have of what interests him: people who let things happen to them and then have to live in the result.
For most of his career that interest was exercised from behind the desk. He joined Toho in 2001 and produced live-action films, among them Train Man (2005) and Confessions (2010), before turning to animation in 2013 and to two directors in particular, Mamoru Hosoda and Makoto Shinkai. The Shinkai partnership runs to three films, including Your Name. (2016) and Suzume (2022). A producer's work does not appear on screen, and neither of our reviews of those films mentions him, which is as it should be. What we can see is the choosing. Both put a piece of the supernatural, a body swap, a chair that walks, next to a teenager who is not sure what they feel. We liked Your Name. a good deal, for its attention to two young people's feelings and in spite of a plot that keeps adding rooms. Suzume we found sincere about a real disaster and thin underneath.
In between he published a novel, If Cats Disappeared from the World (2012), set up his own company, STORY Inc., in 2017, and began directing: a short, Duality (2018), then A Hundred Flowers (2022), then Exit 8. His stated method for adaptation is to follow a source's rules rather than its story, and for an hour of Exit 8 that is exactly right. The game is a corridor, a search for something wrong and a walk back; the film keeps that as its whole shape, with Kazunari Ninomiya's Lost Man doing very little and the tiles doing the rest. It is quietly frightening and it needs no help.
Then it gets help. The film widens, and the Lost Man's trouble with the baby is spelt out in full, though the corridor had already said it without a word. For the last twenty minutes we were aware of how long was left and cross about it, because the film had earned our attention and then spent it on a lesson. It is the reflex of a man who has spent two decades making sure films arrive safely with their audience. As a director he will have to learn to let a few people leave puzzled.
Kawamura once said that he is always surprised when the films succeed. On the evidence of the first hour of Exit 8 he need not be. On the evidence of the last twenty minutes, the surprise is something he could stand to allow the rest of us.
Biography
Genki Kawamura is a Japanese film producer, screenwriter, director and novelist. Born in Yokohama in 1979, he studied journalism at Sophia University and began his career at Toho. He has produced numerous animated features including your name. (2016), Weathering With You (2019) and Suzume (2022).
Kawamura wrote the bestselling novel If Cats Disappeared from the World (2016). He made his feature directorial debut with A Hundred Flowers (2022), which he also wrote and which won him the Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastián International Film Festival. He directed, co-wrote the screenplay with Kentaro Hirase and produced the 2025 film Exit 8, adapted from the video game by Kotake Create.
