Escape Room (film)

Escape Room is a 2019 American psychological horror mystery film directed by Adam Robitel and written by Bragi F. Schut and Maria Melnik. The film stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Tyler Labine, Jay Ellis, Nik Dodani and Yorick van Wageningen, and follows a group of people who are sent to navigate a series of escape rooms, only to discover that their fates are tied to whether or not they can beat them in time.

Development of the film began in August 2017, then under the title The Maze, and the casting process commenced. Filming took place in South Africa in late 2017 through January 2018.

Escape Room was released in the United States on January 4, 2019, by Sony Pictures Entertainment, and was a box office success, grossing over $155 million worldwide. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the atmosphere and cast, but criticized the familiar plot and its failure to take full advantage of its premise. A sequel is planned for release on August 14, 2020.

Plot
The film begins with a montage of a person trying to escape a room, which later turns out to be Ben. At the start of the film, viewers are given a short background on some of the players. Viewers learn that Zoey is a shy physics student who is given a task to do something exciting over Thanksgiving weekend by her Physics professor. Jason is a successful and wealthy daytrader. Ben is a stockboy who hopes to be promoted to customer service to earn more money to support his mom. Danny is a video game enthusiast who loves escape rooms and has successfully escaped many escape rooms. Zoey, Ben, Jason, Amanda, Mike and Danny all receive mysterious boxes, each with a different greeting that describes/praises them. All of them think the boxes come from someone close to them. Zoey is convinced by her roommate that the box is from her Physics professor. Ben is convinced his boss left the box for him. Jason is convinced his boss Mr. Ackerman gave him the box as the gift he mentioned earlier in a phone call. As all the players try to unlock their respective puzzle boxes, they find invitations to the Minos Escape Room Facility for a chance to win $10,000 inside the boxes. Like every escape room, the players were to surrender their phones. As Amanda enters the elevator to get to the waiting room, the front desk employee says, "Thank you for your service", which puzzles Amanda. Danny manages to sneak a hidden second phone into the escape room with him, telling Amanda that it helps kill the boredom in the waiting room. After all the players are in the waiting room, a woman's voice tells them that the Game Master will arrive shortly over the intercom. While waiting for the Game Master, Amanda reads a newspaper. The headline of the newspaper says that five people died from being burned alive, which foreshadows their fate playing the game. It also suggests that the previous players died doing the exact same thing. The players start to make some small talk, and Danny tells the other players the good reviews that were left on this escape room. Ben, having a smoking habit, tries to get out of the room to smoke but realizes the door handle is fake. The players discover they are locked inside and the waiting room is part of the escape room. Searching for clues, Zoey inadvertently activates heating traps when she twists the combination lock where the door handle used to be. The heat increases at a set interval. The players burst out in argument as each of them believes the other is incapable and should not be trusted to do anything that will screw them up. The players rush to find clues to get out of the room. While they are searching for clues, they realize that the woman speaking through the intercom is a robot behind a screen. The phone rings, telling the players to respect the rules posted. As the players try to find the posted rules, Zoey stumbles upon a sticker that says to use the coasters. By clicking on the coasters on the table, Zoey manages to unlock a vent. As the players make their way through one by one, Amanda has a flashback of crawling through the aftermath of an IED attack in Iraq. Viewers learn that Amanda used to be in the military, and is later revealed she used to serve in Iraq, thus explaining the scars on her back. Zoey calms Amanda down and they crawl through the vent. Everyone escapes as the room engulfs in flames.

The players find themselves in a winter cabin, with the door locked by a seven-letter combination. Clues in the room include a poster on the wall that says “You’ll go down in history”, and nine deer heads, each with a different letter under them. The room’s clues trigger Ben to have a flashback of driving drunk with friends, singing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" before crashing the car. He realizes the nine deer heads refer to Santa’s nine reindeer, and “You’ll go down in history” is the last line of the song he and his friends were singing. He suggests "Rudolph," which unlocks the door, and the group escapes into a room resembling a frozen lake. Danny inadvertently triggers a vent which releases cold air into the room. Realizing the temperature in the room is only going to continue dropping and all of them will die of hypothermia, the players scramble to find clues. The players manage to open a chest which contains a red winter coat. Zoey realizes this game is about competition and survival of the fittest, with the red coat representing limited resources. Refusing to compete among themselves, the players agree to share the winter coat. Mike manages to climb a tree after spotting a fishing pole. Zoey manages to use a compass and a clue to find a magnet. Attaching the magnet to the fishing hook, the players reel up a huge ice block with a key encased. The players call for Ben, who is smoking beside the cabin, to pass the lighter he uses to light his cigarettes. Due to having a small fall out with the other players, Ben tosses his lighter, which falls halfway between him and the other players. While retrieving the lighter, Danny falls through the ice and drowns. All the remaining players blame Ben for the incident, even suggesting that Ben is the Game Master. Ben rebukes by pointing out all the other players' flaws. The remaining players are forced to melt the block with body heat from their hands to free the key. Jason suffers a flashback of himself freezing beside someone in a red coat, which later turns out to be his roommate. The players eventually were able to get the key out and unlock the exit as the ice surface explodes.

The five players enter an upside-down billiards bar, where they are transported upwards. The song “Downtown” plays on repeat. In a version of musical chairs, whenever the song stops and the phone rings, a section of floor falls away to reveal an elevator shaft. Amanda finds a locked safe and identifies a missing 8 ball as the key to the room. Zoey looks around the room and realizes that the whole thing is a sliding picture puzzle. As more players get to the puzzle, Jason realizes that the puzzle door is unable to support all of them and one of them would have to get off. Jason screams for Mike to get off but Mike is afraid to do so, as there is no floor right underneath them. Zoey agrees to get off. While she is getting off, she slips and hits the ground right beneath her with her head on the edge. She has a flashback of the aftermath of a plane crash and suffers a panic attack. Jason tries to calm her down and get her to safety before the floor falls off again. Retrieving the eight ball from the safe, Amanda tries to travel to where the other players are, which is also where the door is. While she is travelling to the other players via hanging from the upside down pool table, the eight ball slips out of her pocket and falls on the floor beneath Amanda. Amanda lets go of the pool table to retrieve the ball. Just as the music stops and the phone rings, realizing the floor is going to fall beneath her, she throws the ball to Jason before plummeting to her death.

The remaining four players enter a hospital ward with six beds, suggesting that the game did not know who will make it to this stage and was thus prepared regardless of who made it to the room. The beds were made exactly to the players own beds with medical files on the beds, revealing their past. Viewers learn that all players were sole survivors: Zoey was the only person who survived a plane crash in Vietnam; Jason's roommate suffered from paranoia and confusion from hypothermia, leaving Jason the only survivor; Ben was the only one who survived the drunk joy ride he gave his friends right after he got his license; Mike's brother suffocated from a mine cave-in, leaving Mike the only one alive; Danny was the only one in his family who survived a carbon monoxide poisoning; and Amanda was the only veteran who survived the IED blast. Realizing the Game Master knew everything about them and the entire game has been based on these events, Zoey realizes they are all a "statistical improbability" and that this is a game to find out who is the luckiest of them all instead of the fittest of them all, which was what they believed in the second escape room. A short clip plays, asking the players if they "have the heart to let Dr. Wootan Yu help you become a better you?". Dr. Wootan Yu was a name that showed up quite often in each of the escape rooms, especially the first one. The clip suggests that Dr. Wootan Yu is a heart surgeon, and probably the Game Master. There is a timer counting down from 5:00 minutes. Jason discovers the room will be filled with poisonous gas when the timer runs out. Being fed up from playing by the rules and being forced to sacrifice other players, Zoey refuses to continue playing. The other players argue that they have no choice since they are being watched. Zoey has a lightbulb moment when she thinks back to her Physics paper on the Quantum Zeno effect, whereby "atoms won't change if [one takes] continuous measurements". Atoms represent their current situation. Zoey begins smashing all the cameras, trying to find another way out. Mike, Ben, and Jason find x-rays of hands. While Jason originally thinks the fingers on the hands represent numbers, Ben realizes the hands are sign language and they represent alphabets (clearly something meant for Ben to discover). Ben knows American Sign Language as his cousin is deaf. The alphabets shown by the hands are EKG. The three players (sans Zoey) find the EKG machine. Jason asks to put the pads on the EKG on Ben, testing to see if his heart will be the healthy one to get them out of the room. Ben's heart rate is too low. Jason then asks Mike. Mike's heart rate is higher, but not high enough to work. Jason suggests using the defibrillator on Mike. Mike is unwilling at first, but Jason manipulates Mike into agreeing by referring back to his mining tragedy. Jason accidentally kills Mike with the EKG. Finding no other person to test the EKG on (since Zoey is on her own plan now), Jason follows the instructions from the film to "take a risk". He places the pads on himself and calms himself down to lower his heart rate, which ends up being successful as the timer ends. A passageway opens up. As the room fills with poisonous gas, Jason climbs through the passageway. Ben calls for Zoey to go with them, but Zoey refuses to follow them. Ben climbs through the door. The door closes on Zoey. Zoey dies from the gas.

Entering a room covered in optical illusions and strobe lights, Ben yells at Jason, saying they should not have left Zoey alone to die. Jason snaps at Ben, saying that Zoey would have eventually died; it is only a matter of which room she dies in. Ben confronts Jason over his disregard for the others and his apathy towards the deaths of other players. He deduces that Jason lied when he told them about the boating accident with his roommate. Instead of his roommate wearing the winter coat, suffering from the effects of hypothermia and swimming away on his own (eventually drowning and dying), Jason was the one who wore the winter coat and he murdered his roommate by drowning him to survive. Based on Jason's response, viewers can deduce that Ben was right about Jason. Despite the small fall out, both of them still work together to escape the room. Jason helps Ben open a hatch in the floor, but realizes that they are drugged with a hallucinogen that causes them to believe they are melting. The room also starts to physically spin. The top of the hatch is covered with magazine letters, which read while the players can give up right now, it is better for them to find the antidote. Fighting its effects, Ben and Jason scramble to find the antidote. In a stroke of luck by randomly hitting the walls, Ben activates a switch which reveals the antidote in a syringe. However, there is only a single dose. Jason realizes Ben found the antidote and they break into a fight over the antidote as Jason, all this time throughout the ordeal, refuses to lose the game. During the fight, Jason breaks Ben's leg. Ben eventually pushes Jason into the desk and kills Jason. Ben injects himself with the antidote and falls through the hatch into an elaborate study room, which is also the room in the montage shown at the start of the movie. Ben solves the puzzle and narrowly avoids being crushed by the walls. Meanwhile back in the previous room (the hospital room) armed Minos employees enter in hazmat gear, listing the number of dead people and trying to dispose of them in 20 minutes. While the employees are distracted by the oxygen mask hanging from the ceiling that Zoey was trying to reach, Zoey surprisingly gets up and incapacitates them with an IV stand. Zoey, having miraculously survived from the poisonous gas in the room, seizes a gun, and escapes into a maintenance area.

Ben gets to the control room where he sees his picture on the screen. The control room is the last room in the series. The pictures of all the other players are marked by (X) to symbolize their elimination. He is met by the Game Master, who has controlled the game as designed by the Puzzle Maker. The Game Master reveals that his bet was on Jason; he also explains the reason for the escape rooms, the reason for choosing the players, and the amusement in these "savage" games. The true nature of the contest is that players with a shared experience – college athletes, savants, lone survivors, celebrities, etc. – are lured into the game, and wealthy viewers bet on the survivors. The Game Master reveals there has never been anyone who made it out of the game; Ben was the least hopeful out of the group. The Game Master tries to kill Ben by strangling him as Ben is distracted by lighting a cigarette, but Zoey arrives. Zoey's survival overrides the system, placing her and the Game Master as players in the game with Ben labelled as eliminated. It turns out that Ben is merely unconscious. Ben and Zoey manage to kill the Game Master. As Ben recovers in the hospital, Zoey goes with a detective back to the building where the games took place. Zoey tries to explain events to the police, but all evidence at the facility has disappeared. The detective thinks that all that Zoey had said was an illusion. Zoey tells the detective that Ben can testify, but the detective tells her that doctors found 3 illegal substances in Ben's bloodstream, suggesting that everything was just an illusion. While looking at the graffiti on what is left on the walls of the first escape room, Zoey focuses on the words "No Way Out", which is an anagram for "Wootan Yu". Zoey screams as she realizes that the game is not completely over.

Six months later, Zoey meets up with Ben at a cafe. Ben is now all cleaned up: he is dressed nicely, he is not smoking, and he is now a sales rep for a vegan dog food brand. Zoey also appears different: she is smiling more, her hair is tied up, she opens the conversation with Ben... these all suggesting that she is becoming more outspoken. Both of them have become a better version of themselves. Zoey shows Ben newspaper articles that passed the other players’ deaths as everyday accidents: Mike died of a heart attack in a bathroom in Union Station, Amanda falls and dies in a climbing accident, Jason was thrown off his bike on highway I-64 with DMT found in his system, and Danny drowns in Lake Michigan. Zoey tells Ben that there would have been articles to cover up their deaths too if they died. While Ben suggests for Zoey to let all of it go, Zoey refuses, continuing to seek justice. She pulls out clues for Ben, showing him that the logo they used was coordinates to an unlisted building in Manhattan. Ben agrees to go with Zoey after hearing her rationale out. However, Minos and the mysterious Puzzle Maker are already preparing to make their flight a new deadly game with only a 4% chance of survival.

Cast

 * Taylor Russell as Zoey Davis
 * Logan Miller as Ben Miller
 * Deborah Ann Woll as Amanda Harper
 * Tyler Labine as Mike Nolan
 * Jay Ellis as Jason Walker
 * Nik Dodani as Danny Khan
 * Kenneth Fok as Detective Li
 * Yorick van Wageningen as The Gamemaster

Production
On August 9, 2017, it was announced that the film, then titled The Maze, had commenced casting. It was set to shoot in South Africa in late 2017. In January 2018, director Robitel told Syfy that production had wrapped and that the film would be released in September 2018.

Brian Tyler and John Carey composed the score for the film. The soundtrack was released by Sony Music Entertainment, and includes the full score and a remix of the Escape Room Theme by Madsonik and Kill the Noise.

Release
In May 2018, it was announced that the film had been retitled Escape Room, and that it would be released on November 30, 2018. A month later, the film was pushed back to February 1, 2019, and later was rescheduled for January 4, 2019.

In Poland, United International Pictures announced that the film's release in the country would be delayed for a while, out of respect for the five teenagers who had recently died in the Koszalin escape room fire.

Box office
Escape Room has grossed $57 million in the United States and Canada, and $97.9 million in other territories, for a total worldwide gross of $154.9 million, against a production budget of $9 million.

In the United States and Canada, the film was projected to gross $10–14 million from 2,717 theaters in its opening weekend. It made $7.7 million on its first day, including $2.3 million from Thursday night previews. It went on to debut to $18.2 million, surpassing expectations and finishing second, behind Aquaman. The film made $8.9 million in its second weekend, dropping 51% and finishing fifth.

Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 49% based on 142 reviews, and an average rating of 5.14/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Escape Room fails to unlock much of the potential in its premise, but what's left is still tense and thrilling enough to offer a passing diversion for suspense fans." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 48 out of 100, based on 26 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an above average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Sequel
On February 25, 2019, a sequel was announced as being in active development, with Adam Robitel set to return to direct along with screenwriter Bragi F. Schut and producer Neal H. Moritz. It was scheduled for release on April 17, 2020. But, on June 7, 2019, it was later pushed back to August 14, 2020.