![]() There were two films in the same year entitled Escape Room (2017) and Escape Room (2017), followed by No Escape Room, the high-profile theatrically released Escape Room (2019), which led to a sequel Escape Room: Tournament of Champions (2021), and Escape: Puzzle of Fear (2020) and No Escape (2020). Towards the end of the decade, the phenomenon started to emerge onto film in a bunch of the films that came out all around the same time. By the end of the 2010s, there were escape rooms in most major centres around the world. The phenomenon of the escape room – where people are locked in a room or rooms and have to interpret a series of clues to find a way out within a given length of time – has grown as a form of entertainment in the 2010s. They cannot be sure if the escape room is haunted or it is all part of the show. As the session gets underway and they try to solve the puzzles, members of the group start to be killed. At the location, they are joined by a couple Tyler and Melanie and a solitary guy Andrew. ![]() While waiting in the nowhere town for the car to be repaired, Michael finds an ad for an escape room in a local paper and they decide to fill the time by attending. It’s absolutely taken a leaf from the book of House on Haunted Hill, and with it comes the characters unable to work out if this is real or an elaborate set-up.Michael and his teenage daughter Karen are travelling through the countryside when their vehicle breaks down. The haunted house that is part of a machine used to commune with the dead connects really well with the Escape Room motif, with all the genre staples of moving scenery, time loops and unrealistic geometry. There’s quite a bit we like about this movie. They’re not the world’s most developed characters but they feel real. When they get into the room, some of the characters piss around prodding stuff while others enthusiastically hunt for clues. There’s even an old-fashioned movie to set the scene, and there’s something about old surgery stuff that’s always unsettling. They’re greeted by an in-character host who serves them chai and explains that an inventor did some weird stuff here and five people vanished. ![]() This is a really fun looking experience…without all the spooky shit, of course. It’s a huge, elaborate series of puzzles with clever solutions and a fantastic lore to tie it all together. I will say this – of all the Escape Room movies we’ve been watching lately, this is the one that looks the most fun. Having the characters meet this way means that we learn about them in an organic way rather than a dinner scene where they express their one personality trait like in some Escape Room movies I might mention. ![]() Melanie (Davis) is celebrating her birthday and dragged along her grumpy boyfriend Tyler (Haq), while Andrew (Andres) claims that his therapist suggesting he try some collaborative group activities. Unlike the previous two films the players are not a group of friends, but strangers all their for their own reasons who get put together because they happen to be there for the same session. When their car breaks down in small town America, and little options to pass the time, they decide to head to a local Escape Room held in a nearby manor. Maybe this is the high school teacher in me, but this kind of behaviour really rubs me the wrong way. Our teen protaganist Karen (Ross) is an obnoxious brat and her poor dad Michael (Ghanimé) is just trying to smooth things out with her. Keep in mind that this isn’t a slasher movie where we know that the unlikeable character is going to end up with a machete through their essential parts, these are the characters we want to see succeed. Review: Each of these Escape Room movies begins the same way: with hugely unlikeable characters.
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