Film Review: Escape Room (2019)

The feature film is slowly but surely disappearing as a form with a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, at least if you ask the bosses of Hollywood studios. It is no longer just a realisation that television, ‘greased’ by streaming, has established itself as a far more adequate medium for ‘deeper’ and more serious content, but also that Hollywood, when it comes to genre works, is increasingly rarely making films that are not conceived as the start of a future franchise. All too often this means that a film which would work perfectly well as a standalone whole will be ruined by the effort to forcibly produce a sequel.

Nowhere is this trend more explicitly apparent than in the case of the 2019 horror-thriller Escape Room by Adam Robitel. The title suggests it concerns a so-called ‘escape room’ – a relatively new and increasingly popular form of entertainment for people who want to experience in real life the thrills that, until now, video games alone have provided them. Escape rooms consist of one or more rooms that players must exit by solving puzzles and finding hidden keys.

Escape Room begins in Chicago, where a group of six players are invited to a mysterious building where a game is supposed to begin, the goal of which is to escape from locked rooms. The six players, who belong to different genders, age groups and socio-economic classes, already realise in the waiting room itself that the game has begun, and then discover that the dangers threatening them are real – that they must use all their physical and intellectual skills not only to win, but to try to save their own lives.

A not insignificant number of critics have compared Escape Room to Saw, which can be relatively easily explained by the similarity of concept, that is, plots in which protagonists must solve puzzles to save themselves from trouble. Escape Room, however, is a significantly different film from Saw, which was genre-firmly anchored in the waters of ‘torture porn’; here, partly due to the effort to secure a commercially more viable PG-13 censorship rating, there is no overly explicit violence, rather the insistence is on ‘clean’ horror and suspense. Director Adam Robitel, however, has experience precisely in this type of film, one of the few that Hollywood has been making lately on a low budget.

Here, that experience is reflected in several quite impressive scenes, which betray an ingenious use of set design, that is, the creation of different atmospheres in the different escape rooms. Perhaps this is best seen in the third of several rooms the protagonists must pass through, which also makes clever use of the soundtrack – namely the classic song ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark, whose lyrics serve as a kind of ironic commentary on the action and as a key to the puzzle.

Robitel's directorial talent, however, was limited by a poor-quality script, primarily in terms of characters. Escape Room has relatively few of them, but that small number can be a foundation for quality, primarily when mutually distinct and memorable characters are created who will stay in the audience's memory and towards whose fate they are not indifferent – the best examples of which are SF classics like Predator and Aliens. Here, however, that is not the case, because the characters are reduced to simple clichés: the introverted nerd, the working-class loser, the dyed-in-the-wool trucker, the psychopathic stock trader, the shell-shocked war veteran. One of them serves solely for exposition, that is, to acquaint viewers unfamiliar with escape rooms with this relatively new and unfamiliar concept of entertainment; as soon as he fulfils that task, he becomes unnecessary, and his fate rather predictable.

The impression is not helped by the fact that most of the characters are extremely unlikeable, nor do the members of the cast, with the exception of Deborah Ann Woll (known for her role in the TV series Daredevil), breathe any particular life into them.

The biggest shortcoming of Escape Room, however, is the ending. To viewers, who have followed the events exclusively from the protagonists' perspective up to that point, an ‘elegant’ explanation of what was happening, how and why, is served up – from the mouths of the organisers of the deadly game themselves. And, of course, after the surviving players try to report all this to the authorities, it is quickly revealed that there is no longer any trace of the escape rooms – that, despite all logistical and technical problems, they were removed overnight. At the very end, the audience is treated to a spectacular scene which turns out to be nothing more than an introduction to a sequel, which, was, unsurprisingly, delivered by Robitel in 2021 under title Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.

RATING: 3/10 (+)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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