Escape Room is a 2017 horror/thriller movie directed by Will Wernick, and starring Evan Williams, Annabelle Stephenson, and Elisabeth Hower.
For Tyler's 30th birthday, his girlfriend Christen gets him an unusual gift: admission to a mysterious escape room event. As they enter with four friends, they find themselves trapped in bizarre rooms where they must solve tricky puzzles in order to advance. But Christen has disappeared, and Tyler is shocked to see her on a video monitor, naked and trapped in a cage while the seconds count down. When the cruel game begins to turn deadly, he realizes they may not all escape with their lives.
This film has no relation to Escape Room (2019), although they feature similar concepts. Interestingly, another 2017 movie with the same title
was released about two months prior.
Tropes used in Escape Room include:
- Air-Vent Passageway: The surviving players crawl out of one of the rooms through the large ducts. Justified when it turns out that the vents are just another part of the game.
- Arc Words: "It's all part of the game."
- Deadly Gas: Conrad and Tabby are killed when the room they are in is filled with an acidic gas that causes their flesh to dissolve.
- Death Course: The entire escape room is a death course, with the occupants only having one hour to figure out all of the puzzles and escape. Even if a player does solve a puzzle, they might still be killed if they do not act quickly enough.
- Developing Doomed Characters: The movie spends a large amount of time at Tyler's party, introducing viewers to some fairly unpleasant yuppies, before it even reaches the escape room. Then there is more time arguing inside the escape room before the dying starts.
- The Ditz: Tabby has to count to work out that 'E' is the fifth letter of the alphabet.
- Downer Ending: All the main characters die except for Christen, who is traumatized not only by the kidnapping but also by watching her friends and boyfriend all get gruesomely killed off because of her. The mysterious mastermind of the escape room even taunts her through a payphone, claiming that the police won't believe her story, and in the end whoever orchestrated these events is still at large.
- Extremely Short Timespan: The movie unfolds over the course of the night of Tyler's 30th birthday: beginning with protagonists having dinner in the early evening and ending just before dawn.
- Foreshadowing: When Tyler opens a slot in a door, Anderson remarks that the sliding metal cut his finger. Later on, Anderson is killed by a much bigger, sharper piece of sliding metal.
- For the Evulz: No reason is ever given for why the people behind the escape room are are conducting these bizarre, sadistic and extremely complex executions, which must be phenomenally expensive to stage.
- Gas Chamber: Conrad and Tabby are killed when the room they are in is filled with an acidic gas that causes their flesh to dissolve.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Anderson is killed by being sliced in half by a descending partition in the Air-Vent Passageway.
- Hand in the Hole: The clues indicate that Tyler or Natasha will need to stick their hand in the mouth of the stuffed bear head on the wall in order to open the final door. Given everything they have encountered so far, they are reluctant to do so.
- Hand-or-Object Underwear: When Christen escapes naked from the truck, she covers her breasts with her arms; not entirely successfully.
- Hollywood Acid: Conrad and Tabby are killed by an acidic gas that causes their flesh to dissolve. Amazingly, they do not even notice till their flesh starts to slough off.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The events occur on Tyler's 30th birthday.
- Jerkass to One: Natasha is horrible to her husband Anderson. While Anderson does get exasperated with her and fires back, she belittles him at every opportunity, blames him for Tabby and Conrad dying, and the closest we get to any indication she even cares about him is her being reluctant to look after he dies. To everyone else, however, she's pleasant, or at least neutral.
- Life-or-Limb Decision: Opening what appears to be the final door to the escape room involves reaching inside a stuffed bear's head and pulling a handle to unlock the door. However, a person must remain holding the handle while the door is opened, and as the door is opened, a blade descends which will cut off the hand holding the handle.
- Only Smart People May Pass: The puzzles in the escape room are fiendishly complex, with very little provided in the way of clues to solving them.
- Sadistic Choice: Of the suicidal variety. Tyler and Christen are each presented with a pair of buttons. One of them will save themselves, the other of which will save their partner. Tyler chooses to save himself and Christen chooses to save Tyler. This has the opposite effect, killing Tyler and freeing Christen.
- Sanity Slippage: Tyler starts off cheerful and eager for the escape room, and even when he sees Christen has been kidnapped he thinks it's All Part of the Show (potentially out of denial). When Conrad and Tabby (the latter of whom is Tyler's sister) die, he sinks into despair and becomes short-tempered, but not above reason. As time ticks down and Anderson dies, he becomes openly hostile towards Natasha, willingly and knowingly leaving her for dead so he can get to Christen. And when he finally can communicate with Christen, he's gone raving mad, blaming her for what happened and believing she masterminded the whole thing, and ultimately chooses to save himself over her (which backfires).
- Shameful Strip: Christen is captured, stripped naked and locked in a small cage where she is forced to crouch while her friends navigate the escape room. For further humiliation, images of her are broadcast to her friends inside the escape room.
- Trapped in Containment: Conrad and Tabby are trapped in the autopsy room when the door locks on them. The other players can only watch helplessly through the observation window and the room fills with acidic gas, which causes them to dissolve.
- Uncertain Doom: Natasha is never shown dying; she's left behind in an enclosed room and has her arm broken (if not fully cut off), but it's possible she could survive long enough to be rescued by the police that are coming to Christen's aid at the end.
