Escape rooms are fun little games people like to play to test their puzzle solving skills. Being put in a room and having have to find your way out by using clues to solve a puzzle within an allocated time sounds like a blast, especially with friends or strangers.
What doesn’t sound fun is when those rooms are booby trapped and hell bent on getting you killed or maimed. Escape Room is a film where a handful of unlucky strangers find themselves in a building full of dangerous escape rooms rigged with some of the most creative traps I have seen.
The film had me on the edge of my seat as I watched these characters move through each room knowing the next will be harder, more fatal, and more nerve wrecking. It was a lot of fun…
Saw Without The Gore
Essentially, it is a bit like Saw but without the gore. The film does have some gruesome traps involving people being cooked alive, crushed, drowning, and falling to your death. But it was nowhere near the extreme gore of the Saw movies where impalement and decapitation is common.
Though Escape Room doesn’t suffer from its lack of gory scenes. I actually think it benefited from it. The movie wasn’t so much about how the traps caught everyone but more about how each character gradually breaks under pressure and how they handle one another.
These rooms require team work to survive them and the characters seemed to find it harder and harder to work together as the story went on. It was a good move on the writing team’s part to depict the strain between the characters as panic set in.
Though there are some weird plot holes like a character just trying to solve a puzzle without even attempting to look for a clue (after he has been through so many rooms before), but I guess the plot needed to be pushed along for the sake of time.
Escape Room is currently on Netflix.