Note: I wrote most of this in January of 2019 and neglected to publish it. I rewatched Escape Room for the October Challenge and remembered that this was waiting in my drafts.
A snowstorm was barreling into my part of the Midwest last Friday and my employer sent everyone home at 1 pm to avoid the inevitable disasters on the roads. Unfortunately, my partner wasn't so lucky and I wound up with four hours to kill before I could drive the 25 miles to home. I didn't want to make the drive twice, so I went to a movie instead. I felt bad about the theater employees, who were equally at risk, but the theater was open and the most convenient showtime wasn't for a tentpole movie or an award bait prestige film, but was rather for Escape Room (2019, directed by Adam Robitel) one of those horror movies studios like to dump into theaters every year during the cinematic wastelands at the beginning of January. It's like they're the unofficial start of a new movie year. Perhaps they are the exhalation of a whoopie cushion acting as a starting gun announcing, "And they're off." This tradition dates back at least as far as the early 2000s. Maybe farther. I haven't bothered to research it.
In any event, I went to see Escape Room for no other reason than it had a convenient showtime. It was a pleasant surprise. While it wasn't a world-beater, and has the grave misfortune of coming on the heels of one of the better years for horror movies in recent memory, it's not a film that insults my intelligence, nor is it one that's egregiously incompetent. That's faint praise, alas. What it is is a tense exercise in suspense filmmaking that managed to keep my mind engaged during its entire running time. It's not even particularly frivolous. Within the confines of its PG-13-rated thrills, it's a perfectly fine film that stays within the bounds of its ambitions. If it's not particularly original--and it's not--it at least executes its genre elements with something like elan.
The story goes something like this: six strangers are sent an invitation to challenge a high-end escape room. They don't know who sent the invitations, nor are they given the "rules" of the escape room, and while they're waiting for instructions, the game begins without warning. The strangers are: Ben, a supermarket drone and slacker; Jason, a hot-shot stock broker; Amanda, a troubled Iraq veteran; Mike, a truck driver; Danny, a committed gamer who's the film's exposition mouthpiece; and Zoey, a quiet mathematician and physicist. All of them have something in common, which the game slowly reveals as each room of the game has been specifically tailored to the traumas one or more of the players has suffered in their real lives. The game is also lethal. It begins to pick the players off one by one, until only a winner remains. Zoey, for her part, has formulated a theory about surviving the game: a system can only work if it is observed to work, so she decides to abandon the games and blind the gamemaster. The remaining players soldier on until the end, until only one of them is left.
Escape Room ostensibly takes advantage of the current vogue for real-world escape room attractions, which are sometimes used by businesses as team-building retreats. They are, essentially, a full scale role-playing game, if not a full-blown LARP. The filmmakers are well-aware of the roots of their premise, which is suggested both by the archetypes inhabited by Ben (Logan Miller) and Danny (Nik Dodani), respectively a basement-dwelling loser and a game-mad nerd, and by the presence of Deborah Ann Woll in the cast, who is famously a gaming nerd off screen. As a genre construct, this is familiar territory. Its immediate ancestors are Cube, Saw, and Exam, though it's ultimately salted with Hostel, as well, and even with The Most Dangerous Game. The film only codes two characters as obvious redshirts, which is clever of it, but the two it DOES code as chum are egregiously coded that way. And one of those, the very model of venture capitalist scum, makes it pretty far into the game. He makes it far enough to sabotage the other players, Carter Burke-style, and also far enough to make the outcome of the film transparent before the film is ready for its endgame. This is a flaw in the film's design, but only a minor one. The design of the film's various deathtraps is clever enough to distract the thinness of its characters. There is something else underneath its deployment of genre tropes, though.
Like many horror films over the years, Escape Room functions as a funhouse mirror held up to the culture that made it. In this case, there's a strong thread of class warfare woven into the film. The film's murderous escape rooms as must-see entertainment for an uber-rich clientele is suggestive of real world concerns about inequality and the impunity of the One Percent and the exploitation of labor, even middle-management labor. There is a benefit of clergy suggested here, and further, the film even intimates that guillotines are the clear and necessary redress. It's subtle in how it elides this, given that it is billionaire hedge fund investors who fund most movies these days, but the subtext is there. For a "safe" PG-13 horror movie, it unexpectedly manages to fall firmly on the side of the radical horror movies of the past that have advocated burning everything to the ground. If one uses the entrails of horror movies as an augury of the zeitgeist, this stands as a signpost that torches and pitchforks are on the horizon in the broader culture.
But maybe that's reading too much into things. You certainly don't need to take the film as a warning to enjoy it. It's well mounted, passably clever, and surprisingly engaging for the entirety of its running time. It's not a film to trouble the sleep of the average film goer or horror fan, but neither neither does it waste their time. Not bad for a throwaway. And if you want to read deeper meanings into what you watch? It rewards that impulse, too.
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