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Written and Directed by Will Wernick Starring Keegan Allen, Holland Roden, Denzel Whitaker |
When I started researching Will Wernick’s No Escape (aka Follow Me), I was disappointed that this wasn’t from the director of Escape Room (2017), rather than Escape Room (2019). Despite not having seen the former, I really enjoyed the latter, and the bait-and-switch had me coming into No Escape guarded, unsure of what to expect. By the end of the film, I was happily surprised. Despite some flaws, Wernick does an excellent job at crafting tension as the protagonists navigate the film’s menagerie of traps, and beyond.
No Escape simultaneously feels like a lost Hostel film, a holdover from the recent escape room craze while also being rooted in a world of obnoxious streamers which I’m a little too old to feel familiar with. The combination makes it feel weirdly anachronistic, though no less fun. Structurally, the film plays more like three separate films, with harsh tonal shifts between its segments. Because of that, it suffers from the same issues as many anthologies, particularly, the segments are uneven, and its best segments suffer from its worst.
Frustratingly, the weakest segment is the first, giving the film a fairly significant barrier to entry, but it’s worth sticking around. No Escape makes no effort to hide what kind of film it’s going to be, and spending a third of its runtime building up characters we know are going to be fodder is downright frustrating. Once we get through this however, we get a tense, component, and refreshing throwback to Saw and Hostel, told through the lens of vapid, insufferable influencers.
Once you’re past that barrier, you’re in for a ton of campy fun, with enough tension to keep things interesting. A pick-em-off, there's a fun guessing game in who’ll die next, and the characters, while vapid and insufferable, are perfect targets.
Keegan Allen (Pretty Little Liars) steals the show as Cole, the film's Logan Paul-esque protagonist. He’s a shallow, narcissistic douche, but compelling enough that watching him go through varying degrees of torture is surprisingly amusing. His payoff, which I won’t spoil, is the film’s high point, and left me leaving the film far more satisfied than the first act led me to believe I would be.
It’s hard to talk about this movie without ostensibly spoiling things, if only because what are ostensibly twists are highly telegraphed, but I don’t think that hurt things too much. Basically, this movie goes Annoying Influencer Drama → Escape Room (2017, 2018, or 2019, pick one) → Hostel, and anyone with relatively seasoned horror sensibilities can guess how those end... Quality-wise, the first segment is overlong and obnoxious, the second is tense and extremely well done, and the third is somewhere in between, but lands exactly where you want it in a way that’s totally delightful.
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