No Escape Review: A Tense Social Media Escape

Release date: September 18, 2020
Running time: 88 minutes
Starring:  Denzel Whitaker, Holland Roden, Keegan Allen

A social media star Cole (Allen) travels with his friends to Moscow to capture new content for his successful VLOG.  Always pushing the limits and catering to a growing audience, he and his friends enter a cold world of mystery, excess and danger.  As the line between real life and social media is blurred, the group must fight to escape, and survive.

It feels like there have been a few movies recently focusing on social media and the effects it has on society and reality.  No Escape explores this subject well with a slick VLOG and over the top personality in Cole.  Allen does a great job of mixing the two personas, his public persona and his private persona, though the film does show how those can tend to merge.  But he is entertaining to watch and the film starts with a montage of what Cole has done to set the stage for the overall film.  Cole is joined by some characters people.  The film does a good job of getting a diverse and fun cast together for this escape room torture session, including his girlfriend Erin (Roden), his best friend Thomas (Whitaker), and his other friends Dash (George Janko) and Sam (Siya).  They each bring something different to the table and to the room, and they all contribute to the overall suspense in the film.

And the escape room part is very suspenseful, with some intense puzzles for the crew to solve.  Some of them even have potentially deadly consequences.  And this level of risk is what makes this a tense film to watch.  And it is still a horror movie so the decision making of the crew is definitely hit or miss.  But that being said, the escape room does have a certain amount of sameness to it.  The film mostly takes place in the escape room, and this causes much of it to look and feel similar.  The first part of the film has the friends traveling and exploring some fun locales, but after it moves to the escape room, a lot happens but we don't see a varied locale.  Furthermore, the character of the film changes at some point and feels like a very different movie from the first part.  It's not bad, just not what I expected from the trailers and overall premise.  But I did love that there was a lot of Russian spoken in the film with no subtitles, to make you experience this as the friends did.  It was a nice touch and one that helped frame this film and its story.  And the ending of the movie is a satisfying one, and really elevates the whole experience.

No Escape dials up the tension in this intense escape room experience with a dynamic cast of characters, plenty of suspense, and a fantastic, satisfying ending.  

Rent it.

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