USA. 2017.
Crew
Director – Will Wernick, Screenplay – Noah A.D., Story – Noah A.D. & Will Wernick, Producers – Kelly Delson & Sonia Lisette, Photography – Jason Goodell, Music – Jinxx, Visual Effects – Poets Road (Supervisor- Olivier Saarda), Production Design – Christian Marcus. Production Company – Escape Productions.
Cast
Evan Williams (Tyler), Annabelle Stephenson (Natasha), Elisabeth Hower (Christen Wills), Dan J. Johnson (Anderson), John Ierardi (Conrad), Kelly Delson (Tabby), Billy Flynn (Vinnie), Iris Avalee (Hadlee)
Plot
In Los Angeles, Tyler is taken out to celebrate his thirtieth birthday by his girlfriend Christen. For a surprise, she has purchased tickets to an escape room for Tyler and his friends. They are blindfolded and taken to the secret location – a labyrinth of nested rooms where they must solve cryptic clues to unlock the door to the next room. At the same time, they receive a live video feed that shows Christen imprisoned nude in a cage. As they try to escape, they find that the rooms contain deadly traps.
Escape rooms were a fad that emerged in the mid-2010s and found reasonable popularity around the world. This was one of the first films devoted to the subject, one of three with the same title that came out all around the same time. It was preceded by Escape Room (2017), which came out later the same year as this. It is hard to tell which of 2017’s Escape Room films can be considered as coming out first – this version premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 9, 2017, while the other appeared somewhere in South Korea in April but was mostly seen by the rest of the world in September of that year.
These were then followed by the high-profile theatrically-released Escape Room (2019), which produced a sequel with Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021). Also around the same time we had a bunch of the similarly titled films on the same theme with No Escape Room (2018), Escape: Puzzle of Fear (2020) and No Escape (2020).
The film comes with a captivating opening with one victim (Billy Flynn) trapped inside the escape room and being asked to answer riddles, before being jabbed with a poison needle. We then move to a panel van whose driver is never seen as any more than a black leather gloved arm on the steering wheel as the camera looks out at the Los Angeles night streets while the credits run and we get audio snippets playing on the soundtrack of people being asked riddles and then being tortured. It sets a wonderfully ominous tone for what is to follow.
In the ensuing scenes, director Will Wernick does a fine job in depicting the group of friends as they gather for a party and their misgivings and nervousness as the idea of the escape room is suggested to them. The scenes as they travel there in the blacked-out limo and are required to surrender their phones and put on blindfolds does a fine job in creating the lead-in to the main action. Once we get to the location, the depiction of the escape room proves the best of any of the abovementioned escape room films in that the cryptic clues and puzzles give the impression they have been directly modelled on a real escape room.
Thereafter, Escape Room becomes less interesting. The main problem with the film is that it is a great build-up without much clue about what to do with the third act. We get a couple of torture scenes – a nasty one in which a couple are trapped in a room and their skin burned off with toxic fumes. The film reaches a paranoid ending, but one that gives few clues about the agency behind what is going on – like the 2019 film, the escape room seems to be set up for some type of snuff scenario. The paranoid ending is not dissimilar to the 2019 Escape Room in that it suggests a much more wide-reaching secret society behind everything that is going on, but no clues are given as to who this is.
Escape Room was the first film from director Will Wernick. Wernick subsequently went on to make the social media horror Follow Me (2020), the Covid lockdown thriller Safer at Home (2021) and the non-genre Break (2024).
Trailer here