Escape Room is a 2019 film that is reasonably unique. The concept is a little overdone, to say the least, but the film is compelling enough with pretty decent visual effects. The premise of the film is that six individuals, all of different backgrounds, are invited to an event that they discover is an escape room.
The dialogue in many points is difficult to listen to, and an end part of the film is edited to play as the opening scene. This feels like a poor choice, as the audience is not aware of the severity of what might occur if the character cannot escape from the room, and so how he reacts in the moment is awkward and somewhat uncomfortable to watch. It’s like that one guy who’s just way too into escape rooms.
After this opening scene and the film’s weak attempt at establishing all six characters, the film actually gets into the escape room, or rooms, and at this point becomes much more watchable. What the contestants are subjected to is fairly creative. First, the players are put into a waiting room that gets hotter the longer they stay in it. Then they go to a winter cabin and quickly find their way into a new room that appears to be outside in the middle of winter. The players stand on frozen ice that they quickly realize is not as uniformly frozen as it appears. It is in this room that the first death occurs.
Next, the players enter a bar, but everything in the room is upside down and they are standing on the ceiling. They then discover that the room is actually an elevator that takes them about twenty stories up. In this room, the characters quickly realize that when the dial tone of a phone in this room goes off, one of the ceiling tiles breaks away from the rest of the room and plummets back down the twenty stories the elevator just climbed up.
This room is by far the most inventive in the film. The stakes feel suitably high, and navigating the room's puzzle becomes increasingly harder as time goes on. The ticking clock device, cleverly, is a song being played on the jukebox. All of the elements in this room make it feel like it could have been an amazing short film. It's too bad the movie never quite lives up to it.
The following room is in a hospital with a bed for each of the six initial players. This functions mostly as an explanation as to how these specific individuals were chosen to play this game, and how the various rooms in the game mirror real-life events that the characters themselves experienced.
The two remaining rooms are certainly the least interesting of the whole game. One is a spinning room with strobing lights that drugs the two players who survived to that point. Following that is the room that was edited to play at the beginning, which is just a typical-looking escape room, but the walls slowly close in the longer a player is in it.
Throughout the film, there are a series of flashbacks that explain brief moments of many of the character’s near-death experiences, and how those experiences were mirrored by elements in the game. However, the film spends little time on who created the escape room and why, other than one character’s brief explanation that they were ‘lucky’ to survive those experiences and now someone wants to see which of them is the ‘luckiest’.
Reasonably, however, an escape room doesn’t seem like much of a test of luck as opposed to intelligence. Additionally, if a person or group of people were to go through the trouble of crafting this escape room, and also destroy all the evidence of it having existed, create new evidence to explain the deaths of the players who died, and also have a pool with a group of people wagering as to who would survive the longest, it seems so unlikely that they would only do this once, with just one group of people.
The movie argues that the people in the escape room were chosen for a reason and that the game was made for them, but it seems so unrealistic that the people perpetrating this, if they are really so sadistic, wouldn’t need to do it more than once. It seems like they would just try to find any random people on the street. Perhaps this was a special ‘luck’ based iteration of the game, but it feels like it could have been so much more compelling if these people were just normal people instead of 'the chosen ones.'
The film wastes so much time looking for parallels and reasons when the story could have been told with more brevity and just as much interest if all the six characters were just people who wanted to do an escape room, only to find that it was actually not what they were expecting at all. Adding in that they were all ‘lucky’ and that the whole thing was a test to gauge how lucky feels clunky. The end of the film also seems to be very desperately attempting to set up a sequel, as the final sequence feels more like the start of a sequel film than the end of an original. It doesn’t quite fit and extends beyond a logical ending point for the film.
Escape Room is a lighthearted and easy watch. It is far from a perfect film, and some scenes are certainly more compelling than others. And it is a fairly inventive film visually, even if there are two other films with the same premise and title that both came out in 2017. A sequel to this particular Escape Room is planned to be released sometime in 2022.