An alcoholic millennial, a physics whiz, a game geek, a soldier, a miner, and a type A businessman walk into an escape room…is not the start of a bad joke.

In Escape Room, six strangers with one thing in common each get a mysterious invitation to participate in, you guessed it, an escape room. Shortly after the game’s started, they realize that the creator of the game, a Dr. Wootan Yu, knows their lives and pasts, down to the minutiae, and he’s watching everything from the surveillance cameras. We never really find out much about Dr. Yu, other than that he is one sick (rhymes with duck). He’s also apparently very rich and has a lot of helpers and time.
The group has to put their heads together to find and solve clues, not only to get out of the room and beat a time record, or to receive the cash prize that was written on the invitation. Solving the clues means getting out alive. And any gory deaths that do happen, certainly don’t happen from lack of trying.

The constant tension is fun, especially when the group solves a riddle that gets them out of one predicament but that very solution sets off a chain of events that activates a new mess.

Watching Escape Room includes all the thrills that the characters experience, minus the dying.
But you won’t escape the end of the film unscathed. You’re bashed over the head with a very obvious hint at a sequel. And actually, I can’t say that I’m not looking forward to it.

Janielle Williams