A glitch in the matrix, a rip in existence’s fragile fabric, and suddenly everything we knew about the world is snuffed out … or perhaps revealed to us for the first time. We see its arbitrariness, its cruelty, its vast indifference to the lab rats scurrying around frantically within it, heading for a death they cannot imagine. Genki Kawamura’s psychological mystery is inspired by the Japanese video game of the same name, and also by the repetitions of Groundhog Day and the vertiginous perspectives of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, with those corridors whose corners cannot be rounded without coming face-to-face with something horrible.

Kazunari Ninomiya plays a depressed young man on a crowded rush-hour Japanese subway train who one day sees a boorish commuter screaming at a young mother for not keeping her baby quiet. On alighting at the platform he takes a call from his ex-girlfriend – and that iPhone ringtone is very upsetting all by itself, guaranteed to have every audience member reflexively reaching for their own phone with guilty dread. She reveals that she is pregnant and something in the coincidence of these events unnerves the young man.

Down lengthy and echoingly empty white-tiled passageways, he heads for the correct exit, Exit 8, that snake-eating-tail number resembling the endless Möbius strip in the posters for an Escher exhibition that he notices on the walls. Patiently, he follows the signs for Exit 8 until he realises he’s back where he started; another eerie, fruitless circuit discloses the same impassive man walking past him at the same point. With irritation, dismay and then mounting existential panic he realises that he can’t find the way out. The exit is gone. He is trapped.

Or is he? Some “rules” posted on the wall reveal that he can escape if he just keeps walking forward. But when he turns back in the opposite direction each time he notices “anomalies” or inconsistencies in what he sees around him: the posters, photo-booth machine, pile of rubbish and locked security doors whose positioning and shape will soon become as familiar to him – and us – as the layout of our own houses. Each successful circuit mastered thus becomes a completed level in the video game from hell. And he begins to have a relationship of sorts with other lost souls there, including that impassive man (Yamato Kochi) and a small boy (Naru Asanuma).

Normally, a movie’s obvious resemblance to the video game that inspired it results in a fatal inertia or imaginative deficit. Here, it is the whole point. All these wage-slave commuters on the metro believe in the game of life, taking the blue pill, doing the same thing every day, completing the levels of their professional careers; trusting that the rules, though fiendishly difficult, are fair on their own terms. But the young man can’t get out. Is his nightmarish paralysis a parable for expectant-father anxiety? Maybe. But this film doesn’t need a midlife metaphorical reading to be scary. It is crushing just taking place in featureless modern buildings – what Marc Augé called the “non-places” of modernity – whose forms insist on our anonymity and insignificance. This is an elegant, chilly dream of despair.