If you are one of those who likes to solve riddles as well as enjoy graphic content, the new Adam Robitel thriller Escape Room is the movie to watch. The film will for sure keep the tension cranked up all the time, entertained by the unusual element of deciphering the rooms where the characters are trying to survive.

The movie begins in a room full of elegant wood furniture and a man who is looking for hints in order to get out of it. Uncovering hint by hint he accidentally gets the wrong combination on the puzzle door which is the exit and the wall of the room starts to crush him, leaving him minutes to decipher the code. He fails to find any hint that will help him to open the door as he is crushed to death when the scene, predictably, cuts away.

Then we head back to three days previous, where we meet the young brilliant physics/math student Zoey (Taylor Russell), who is shy and has trouble finding friends, staying home alone on Thanksgiving. She receives a unique puzzle box through the mail, and she thinks that the box is from her professor. The situation is the same for the other five main characters.

They all receive that same elegant box and each and every one of them try to open it. Some of them had trouble deciphering the cube but at the end, all succeeded and a small paper came out of it. The paper was actually an invitation to the mysterious Minos building, stating they are competing for a prize of 10,000 dollars.

All the characters go to the strange building and, at the reception, they are asked to leave their mobile devices behind (neatly removing that element from the story) as they start to suspect something.

They are seated in a room waiting for the game to begin. All of the characters have different backgrounds and have experienced something traumatic in the past. As they try to get to know each other, they don’t realize that the game has already begun until Danny Khan (the geeky guy) tries to exit the room and everything starts to heat up making it impossible to remain.

All characters have different tempers and obviously start to argue with one another until they realize they should work as a team in order to get out. They still think it is just a regular game, which they entered just for the money, but in fact it could have been easier to have simply bet on horse racing results.

After that, room follows room, each designed to reflect one of the characters’ past. Even so, they still think somebody is pulling a prank on them, until the bodies begin to fall…

The movie itself does not carry any secret message, meaning or moral. The plot is just trying to tell us that even though we need to work together in order to survive, it is still possible that we won’t make it due to personalities clashing. It also shows how everyone has their own traumas and fears and how they try to escape them everyday, by using hobbies and gimmicks. Ironically, the Escape Room is where they all come to find those ghosts from their past.

Escape Room will give you strange satisfaction, while you keep trying to figure out what is going on. Each room they enter is presented perfectly and each hint must be searched within the past of the characters. Encountering strange rooms that look weird and yet amazing is very cool.

The movie hasn’t been highly rated by reviewers and critics so far however, averaging a 6.4/10 score in IMDB. On Metacritic it has a rate of 48, with mixed opinions like the one from the Vulture, who suggest it is a “tight, fun little thriller”, while the Philadelphia Daily News claims while “the setup may seem recyclable, it really is disposable”.

Meanwhile, Rotten Tomatoes gives it also only 49% percentage on the Tomatometer, summing up that the movie “fails to unlock much of the potential in its premise, but what’s left is still tense and thrilling enough to offer a passing diversion for suspense fans”. All in all, it’s still a great late-night thriller/horror movie that may even deliver a sequel in the upcoming years – especially consider the box office.

Escape Room is released on DVD in the UK on June 10, 2019

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