After their murderously harrowing bonding experience is finally behind them, the two lone survivors of a death-trap ordeal meet up to talk about getting on a plane. Everyone else they could talk about it with is, well, dead — so it’s up to them to decide if they still want to press onward for answers about how they ever got swept up in this horror insanity in the first place.
Shift a couple of key points, and that almost sounds like the ending of the original Final Destination, the 2000 fright flick that launched an entire mini-genre of survivor’s-guilt horror films where Death (yes, with a capital “D”) seems to have an omniscient grip on each character’s fate. But it’s actually the sequel-setup conclusion to 2019’s Escape Room (playing on SYFY this month — check the schedule here), a scary story that has its own kind of fun with the idea that its characters are only pawns in a much darker game.
Escape Room: Who’s really pulling the strings in this murder maze?
Escape Room might not quite be as scary as Final Destination, a fright franchise whose influence never feels far from the surface thanks to a similar slew of complicated set pieces and an overall sense of deadly inevitability. But once its ensemble of unwitting victims gets locked in together and the life-or-death games fire up, it whips up killer momentum as each target falls — all while viewers get schooled on the game’s twisty ground rules as the body count piles up.
Shy college nerd Zoey (Taylor Russell) and perpetual slacker Ben (Logan Miller) are the two players left standing after surviving Escape Room’s maze of horrors. Four others — each a stranger to each other until the day of their fateful Escape Room meeting — died trying to make it out of the game, a room-by-room nightmare crammed with inventive murder-puzzles that suggest the ordeal’s mysterious creator knows way too much about each participant’s past life.
Where Final Destination hints at supernatural forces to explain why its characters have to suffer such poetically twisted deaths, Escape Room has a more concrete, yet no less creepy, reason for offing its cast of ill-fated unfortunates. Whoever created the movie’s deadly Escape Room contraption knows that each of the players share one thing in common: They all survived past personal tragedies that killed everyone else who was involved.
Armed with a sick sense of cosmic justice (and apparently near-limitless financial resources to fund the game’s insanely elaborate traps), Escape Room’s Saw-like Gamemaster (Yorick van Wageningen) doesn’t appear until the movie’s closing act. But as viewers probably can guess, he harbors a morbid curiosity to find out which survivor’s lucky streak can last the longest once they’re playing by the rules of his cruel puzzle box. And in the bargain, he might even wrest some bonus voyeur’s entertainment from watching how his twisted experiments tease out hidden (and sometimes ugly) facets of his victims’ inner character.
Each victim’s past tragedy gets thrown back at them inside Escape Room’s labyrinth of torture. For high-powered stock trader Jason (Jay Ellis), it was an icebound shipwreck; for dorky escape room enthusiast Danny (Nik Dodani), it was a family-slaying gas leak. Traumatized war veteran Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll) walked away from an overseas IED blast, while trucker driver Mike (Tyler Labine) was the sole survivor of a mining disaster.
They might’ve survived all those tragedies out in the real world, but once they’re in the Escape Room, not everyone will live long enough to appreciate all the trouble the game’s mastermind must’ve gone to in mining the details of their personal pasts. Left standing at the end to reflect on the game’s strange coincidences, Zoey and Ben decide to hop a plane to track down the game’s corporate overlords in New York, a choice that sets up one final rug-pull to launch them straight into Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, the movie’s 2021 sequel.
Escape Room proved a sleeper hit at the 2019 box office, returning a $155 million worldwide ticket haul against a modest production budget of only $9 million. Russell and Miller reprised their roles as Zoey and Ben for the second film, alongside Woll — whose record-scratch reappearance after her character’s wild fate in the first movie expands on the larger franchise’s deepening lore.
Director Adam Robitel (Insidious: The Last Key) has since hinted that a third Escape Room installment could someday materialize. Based on the first two films’ interconnected themes, this is definitely the kind of horror series that seeks to get fans hooked into its wider story-verse from the first movie onward. You can take that first fateful step on SYFY, where Escape Room is playing all month long — click here for the full TV schedule!
