time loop

Exit 8 (2026)

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I’ve been seeing a lot of advertising (or maybe just the same thumbnail from a singular YouTube video, over and over) for Exit 8 that refers to the film as “Cube meets Tokyo.” Despite the fact that we already had that, and it was bad, I was still intrigued enough by the trailer to want to give this one a shot. The premise is fairly simple. A lost man (Kazunari Ninomiya) finds himself caught in a repeating loop of the same few sections of corridor in an underground subway tunnel. Initially spooked at finding himself completely alone and unable to locate an exit, he encounters increasingly unsettling visions before realizing that there are a set of instructions on the wall that boil down to “continue walking until you encounter an anomaly, then turn around and keep walking.” Said anomalies surface as things as relatively mundane as misplaced doorknobs and distant voices of crying babies to mutant rat creatures that resemble the experiments he barely noticed while scrolling through social media on the train. The lost man is in a state of turmoil, having learned that his ex-girlfriend is pregnant mere moments after he failed to confront a salaryman on the train for screaming at a mother with a cranky infant, then immediately finding himself in the infinitely-looping corridor. When he encounters a little boy (Naru Asanuma) and realizes that he’s not part of whatever purgatorial situation within which he’s been entrapped, he and the child try to get out together. If they can get through all eight levels without being deceived or overlooking an anomaly, they’ll find their way out. 

I’m going to make three points of comparison here to horror movies past, and Cube is not going to be one of them. First, in what I intend to be the most flattering comparison, Exit 8 has a great deal of similarities to one of my favorite horror films, Jacob’s Ladder. The 1990 Adrian Lyne film features Tim Robbins as a man potentially trapped in a reality he can’t be sure is real while experiencing subliminal visions of horrors beyond his comprehension, with a few memorable sequences set in the NYC subway system. Exit 8 dilates those underground set pieces to encompass the entire purgatorial situation, which is a neat trick, and it plays with the hypnotic monotony of depersonalized commuting in a series of seemingly identical hallways. Jacob’s Ladder finds Robbins’s character interacting with an almost angelic version of the deceased son he lost (a pre-Home Alone Macaulay Culkin), who helps him in a way that I can’t really talk about without spoiling that film, other than to say that Jacob’s journey, like The Lost Man’s, requires a certain level of acceptance. 

Secondly, in what I intend to be an unflattering comparison, Exit 8 has the distinction of being the second horror film I’ve seen so far this year that also happens to be, intentionally or not, pro-life propaganda. Concerning! Arguably, this one’s the worse of the two. At least in Undertone, the choice of whether or not to keep her baby was a decision that the mother was making; here, one of her only lines of dialogue, repeated almost as often as we see the “Exit 8” sign is, “Which is it?” Still, this is mitigated by the third point of previous film similarity, which is a neutral comparison at best. Exit 8 reminds me most of Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, in that they have the same (mildly spoilery) conceit, which is that the protagonist is guided by a specter of their as-yet-unborn child. In Dream Child, that takes the form of Alice’s fetus appearing to her as a young child in her dreams and helping her fight Freddy Krueger; here it’s The Boy, who responds to an apparition of The Lost Man’s girlfriend by calling for her as his mother, revealing that he is, somehow, the man’s son. 

From what I can tell by perusing some reviews and summaries of the video game this film adapts, the player character therein is an utterly blank canvas, and there’s no real “plot” to speak of: no unplanned pregnancy woes, no encounters with a non-anomaly character like The Boy, no shameful cowardice at failing to confront a raging asshole. It doesn’t even seem like The Lost Man’s asthma, which I assumed had to be a gameplay mechanic, originated there. All of this is newly written for the film, and while I understand that the film, being based upon a game that is all about the mechanics and the tension rather than any real narrative, had to come up with some stakes. I’m not sure why it had to be this narrative, but the other way that this most evokes Dream Child is that its pro-”keeping the baby” messaging is also so bizarrely incoherent that it utterly falls apart; Madonna’s “Papa Don’t Preach” ends up being more effectively propagandistic in just a couple of minutes than Exit 8 and Dream Child combined. It’s not a defense of the film’s politics, but it’s so sloppy that it’s hard to grasp onto anything substantial enough to be annoyed by. 

I suppose, eventually, we do have to get around to examining this film in conversation with Cube. When we talked about that film on the podcast (as well as its sequel and prequel), Brandon’s primary complaint was that what Cube failed to deliver upon was the promise of cool death traps in the series of successive, identical, cubical rooms. As someone who saw those movies in earlier, more formative years, I already had an idea of the shape of the narrative, so I wasn’t set up to be underwhelmed by the ride in the same way that he was. I experienced my own great disappointment when we watched the 2021 version from Japan, which, among its many other faults, broke the cardinal rule of The Cube: we should never see what’s outside The Cube. I was very frustrated the first time that Exit 8 also showed us something that was happening outside of the liminal space in which our characters are trapped, as we see the woman on the other end of the phone call that The Lost Man receives while lost in the corridors. This does turn out to be an (obvious) misdirect, but there’s a sequence that comes later in which The Lost Man imagines himself on the beach with The Boy and his mother, and I can’t help but think that would feel more emotionally impactful if we didn’t have the earlier scene, and that conversation in itself would be more exciting if we only saw The Lost Man’s end of the line and stayed inside the spooky hallway. 

Further, the film’s decision to literalize the metaphor with The Boy, by making him actually be his future son rather than simply a reflection of what his future child could be. It’s a hat on a hat, lacking a subtle touch that would make the film more emotionally impactful. I’m grasping at straws trying to articulate it, but it’s almost as D.O.A. an idea as making Newt be Ripley’s actual daughter in Aliens rather than an objective correlative representing her guilt about outliving her actual child. Excise the scene in which The Boy recognizes The Lost Man’s ex as his mother and this is instantly a more thoughtful movie, even if you leave in the beach dream. That also lends more emotional heft to what we learn about The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), who appears as part of the loop in The Lost Man’s journey, but whom we learn was himself a previous captive of the space who was trying to find his own way out. When he experiences frustration with having to start over after getting within spitting distance of level eight, he laments that he “was supposed to meet [his] son today.” As a manifestation of what The Lost Man could become, it’s admittedly a little on the nose, but it too would feel more nuanced if we just cut out the “mother” stuff. 

All of these quibbles having been laid out, it’s worth noting that this is a fun experiment and a masterful success on a technical level. The space itself is perfectly sterile and unsettlingly empty. The opening sequence, which is shot entirely in the first person, is an impressive feat, with the first shot we see of our main character being his reflection in the window of the subway car as he turns up his music to ignore the verbally abusive salaryman. I had a very immersive experience, as the only tickets still available were in the very front row, and I had a hell of a ride even as I found myself stumbling over the film’s slippery, amorphous thesis. I also appreciate that the film is open-ended; this is a mild spoiler, but after he manages to find Exit 8 and return to the real world, The Lost Man once again finds himself in a (presumably) metaphorical loop, as he experiences an identical situation as the one which opened the movie, as the same salaryman is screaming at the same young mother. The film cuts to credits with our lead once again staring into his own reflection. It seems that most reviewers infer that he will now confront this man and make up for his earlier bystander syndrome. I prefer to read the ambiguity of the ending from the other direction, and that for all he experienced in the liminal subway corridor he’s still essentially the same man, cowardice and all. It leaves some room for interpretation, that there may be some truth in his conviction that a person who stands idly by while someone is aggressively harassed may not be suited to parenthood. It’s not a mark in this film’s favor that I’ve spent so much time describing the film that I wish it was rather than the film that it is, but it’s still an excellently executed premise, and worth checking out for its design and camera movement if nothing else. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2026)

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Brandon forewarned me that he didn’t much care for Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die, but based on what he related about the film, I had a feeling that I would enjoy it more than he did. For the entirety of the its darkly comedic first half, I barely went more than five minutes without a hearty chuckle. Around the midpoint, however, even though the film’s comedic tone remained largely the same, the laughs became fewer and farther between. Immediately after leaving the theater having watched the film, I texted Brandon to let him know that I had been let down by the fairly conventional (as much as that descriptor can apply here) second half, and we are very much aligned on what works and what doesn’t. 

Good Luck opens with a purported time traveler (Sam Rockwell) arriving in a diner called Norm’s, where he informs the smartphone-addicted diners therein that he has arrived from the future to alter the upcoming AI quantum singularity — not by preventing its creation at the hands of a nine year old genius (as its genesis is supposedly inevitable) but by uploading a software patch that will result in the AI having a sense of ethics and benevolence. This is his 117th attempt to put right what once went wrong, as he is convinced that some combination of diners will result in the correct team to keep this apocalypse from kicking off. Using knowledge of the customers he’s gained in previous time loops, he gathers a small squad: ill-fated Boy Scout troop leader Bob, high school teachers Mark (Michael Peña) and Janet (Zazie Beetz), grieving mother Susan (Juno Temple), boisterous Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), and offbeat loner Ingrid (The White Lotus season two’s Haley Lu Richardson). Together, they have to make it out of the diner and across the city so that the future man can plug in a USB that will prevent the apocalypse, all while avoiding trigger-happy police, mask-wearing assailants wielding automatic weapons, and eventually, a chimeric monster made of cats. 

Interspersed with this journey are the vignettes about the diners and their individual experiences with the various pieces of technology that will converge into our future overlord. While working as a substitute at the school where Janet is employed full time, Mark discovers that the students have become mindless automatons that—between verbalizing the occasional brand name—act as a horde at the direction of something within their phones. Susan loses her son in a school shooting but is presented with the opportunity to “resurrect” him, after a fashion. Ingrid suffers from a condition that makes her nose bleed in the presence of wireless signals, leaving her little opportunity to find gainful employment; for a time, she’s able to get by as a generic “princess” character for little girls’ birthday parties, but as the prevalence of children using smartphones increases, she finds even this avenue to be a dead end. Compounding things, her equally luddite boyfriend is eventually tempted to try on a set of VR goggles, which leads him to choosing to “transition” into the virtual world full time, leaving her completely alone. Finally, we also get to see what the time traveler’s life was like growing up, in a world in which half of the population lives “jacked in” to the AI’s perfect virtual world, while the other half has perished. 

You’ll notice that the first two backstories sound bleak, and while they are, the darkness within them is played for some great satirical humor. Mark and Janet’s story is a zombie pastiche that plays out like David Tennant-era Doctor Who attempting to do a Black Mirror plot, and although its “phones make you stupid” concept comes off as a bit of intergenerational youth-bashing at first, the blasé treatment of a school shooting is just observational enough to punch through the discomfort of the situation. Susan’s story is much more heart-breaking, as she learns that her son has been gunned down in another “unpreventable” school shooting, but that he can “come back” in a cloned form that is mostly subsidized by the government since he was the victim of campus-based gun violence. He’s not the same, of course, and she reluctantly accepts the delivery of a shallow shadow of her child who occasionally recites ad copy about a low-calorie peach tea. It’s very grim stuff, but this is also the funniest part, as the tragedy is treated with the same casual shoulder-shrugging that mass shootings in America are given in reality, and all of the bits within it land: the salesman who can hardly disguise his annoyance at being given a “first timer” or his boredom as he tries to speedrun Susan through her customization options, the vapid disregard for the tragedy that other moms who have already replaced their children before display, and the couple who have clearly succumbed to madness after going through the process four times and decided to do a “goofy one” this time around. This is also the more straightforward Black Mirror… let’s say “homage,” as this essentially smashes together the plots of “Common People” and “Be Right Back,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not effective unto itself. 

It’s here that the film takes a downward turn for me, as the flashbacks we get for both Ingrid and the man from the future are completely lacking in moments of levity, even of the extremely dark kind. Ingrid’s loss of the one person she thought she could trust, who was turned into an obedient slave to the machine after only the smallest temptation, isn’t fun to watch. It’s also where the film feels the most reactionary in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of the film’s thesis. Ingrid’s boyfriend, after spending his days in the VR headset over the course of less than a week seems to become completely radicalized without any regard for how his lifestyle change affects his partner. She comes home one day to find him having prepared dinner for them, acting out of character, and it’s during this seeming return to their happy domesticity that he springs on her that he’s going to “transition,” which seems like a loaded term in this context. What he’s doing is essentially allowing himself to be voluntarily hooked into the nursing home equivalent of one of those goo vats from The Matrix and live the rest of his life in the perfected version of reality that the machine promises. If anything, he’s “uploading,” but the use of transition, in combination with other behaviors, feels like a regressive take. Perhaps this is best demonstrated in his frustration that Ingrid doesn’t understand the niche slang that he’s suddenly picked up from those people he’s meeting online, you know, the ones predatorily encouraging him to transition? It hews too close to right wing conspiracy signaling for me, and I didn’t like that. 

As one would imagine, the future man’s childhood is the most bleak, and as a result, when the back half of the film has to try and maintain a sense of comedic balance with the first half, it has to push its jokes out of the vignettes and into the framing device of the group trying to divert the quantum singularity before the timer on the traveler’s wrist finishes its countdown. This narrative has been jokey throughout, but the bits within it vary wildly in their success. Sam Rockwell yelling at a diner full of people? Goes on too long before he starts to demonstrate his knowledge of people gathered from previous loops, but once that starts, the jokes start to land better. Convincing Bob to draw the fire of the assembled police force outside? Decent enough, but barely consequential. In the second half, this has to escalate, so instead we get some exposition about the programmer’s access to both 3D printing tech and (presumably) the cloning potential from the company that “resurrected” Susan’s son and so we get a kaiju made of memes that didn’t work for me at all. It did get a 50% approval rating in my screening, since my viewing companion and I were alone and he enjoyed it, so it may work for others. The final showdown goes on for just a little too long and is, as noted in the intro, a bit of a conventional place for this narrative to go (its few “twists” will surprise no one but children). Bizarrely, the film concludes open-endedly; it’s not exactly calling for a sequel, but it’s clear that the ending is written with greater importance placed on that possibility than the importance of a satisfactory conclusion. Given that the film had plenty of things to say but had already run out of them by the time it ended, I think an ending that was either optimistic or nihilistic would have been a wiser way to go, rather than an unambitiously ambiguous one. It’s a little overcooked, but the highs of the first half carry it across the finish line despite the lows of the second, and it averages out to be pretty good overall. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Looop Lapeta (2022)

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The only time I’ve ever seen the high-style, high-energy time loop thriller Run Lola Run was at a free screening for LSU students back in the early aughts.  It was a great programming choice for entertaining a crowd of stoned, Adderall-addled freshmen with a collective attention span of mere seconds, but even then it felt like an ancient artifact from another time & place, just a few years after its initial release.  Run Lola Run is tweaked-out Euro trash pop art that only could have been made in the 1990s, a rave culture video game for the MTV era.  That’s why it seemed so absurd all these decades later that a straight-to-Netflix Bollywood remake of the film would attempt to recapture that time-specific magic.  I was already out of sync with the Hackers-on-ecstasy raver energy of the light-hearted German thriller back in the early 2000s, so I wasn’t sure what Looop Lapeta was expecting to mine from it in the 2020s.

That uncertainty was cleared up in the first scene, when our heroine starts her time loop staring in a bathroom mirror, contemplating her life choices (especially her casual drug use and unexpected pregnancy) on the occasion of her birthday.  As she keeps resetting her day to that bathroom-mirror birthday epiphany, it’s quickly apparent that Looop Lapeta doubles as both a decades-late Bollywood remake of Run Lola Run and a timely Bollywood remake of Russian Doll.  Neither comparison does it any favors, really, but at least the decision to revive Run Lola Run makes more sense when you consider it in the context of all the #timeloopcontent that has been flooding Netflix & other streaming platforms in the Russian Doll era.  This is a movie obsessed with and weighed down by context too, considering all the backstory it piles on the barebones Run Lola Run plot template – from why our heroine runs so much (she’s a former Olympic athlete) to why she’s so emotionally dependent on her dirtbag boyfriend (he saved her from killing herself when her Olympic dreams were crushed).  Even the time loop she’s stuck in while attempting to stop her favorite fuckboy from ruining their lives with a botched armed robbery is stretched out from Run Lola Run‘s original 20-minute cycle to 50 minutes, indicating just how weighed down it is by extraneous narrative clutter.  It updates Run Lola Run by halfway converting it into a TV show – often a broad sitcom where the jokes rarely land.

Besides the recent popularity of high-concept time loop stories, Looop Lapeta also appears attracted to the rebellious counterculture posturing of Run Lola Run.  It takes advantage of the amoral freedom of working with Netflix as much as it can, raising a middle finger directly at the camera in bratty defiance.  Whereas most mainstream Indian films I’ve seen in recent years are slapped with moralistic warnings about the dangers of cigarettes & alcohol, Looop Lapeta goes out of its way to highlight how cool swearing, pot-smoking, and premarital sex make its heroine look.  It’s about as dangerous as an anarchy symbol scribbled on a middle schooler’s notebook, but it makes the film stand out in the context of its industry.  That kind of hedonistic behavior is more akin to Russian Doll than Run Lola Run in terms of actual on-screen content (Lola, as you will remember, mostly just runs), but it’s a juvenile version of rebelliousness that is stilly fully visible in its 1998 source material.

I’m just not convinced Looop Lapeta ever matches Run Lola Run in terms of style.  Run Lola Run is all style, no substance (gloriously so), while Looop Lapeta is all substance in search of some sense of style.  It updates the camcorder footage from Run Lola Run to its contemporary equivalent in smartphone framing, and it has occasional fun with crosslighting & low music video angles, but for the most part its style feels limp & inert.  Inviting comparisons to such a propulsive, dizzying free-for-all only undercuts its own occasional attempts at high-style filmmaking, especially since everything in-between those touches plays like a shot-for-Netflix sitcom.  The most Looop Lapeta did for me is make me want to revisit Run Lola Run, a college campus classic, and to be more selective with my straight-to-Netflix genre viewings.  It’s harmless, but it’s also inessential – especially considering how many time loop movies we’ve seen in the past few years (Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day, Palm Springs, The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, etc. etc. etc.).

-Brandon Ledet