Title: Escape Room
Director: Adam Robitel
Year: 2019
Genre: PG-13 Horror / Thriller
Starring: Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, Jay Ellis, Tyler Labine
If you like movies at all in 2025, odds are you like B-movies. An ad-hoc (cultural) definition is as follows: formulaic, thematically shallow, minimal characterization, but with a high concept, full throttle premise. But why do B-movies exist? Sure there’s commercial pressures: B-movies make money and people are eager to work in entertainment so they’ll be willing to put their name to anything (of course all of those folks are convinced they’ve got masterpiece locked up in their minds somewhere).
If B-movies are admittedly not top tier, why do we bother watching them? In a world of grey, where crummy politicians have become crummy entertainment, sometimes we just want to watch bad guys who are bad and good guys who are good. The theme can be simple: being vaguely good is better than being vaguely bad. And characters can be thin so long as they roughly match up to people we meet in our everyday lives.
But why do I say if you like movies at all you like B-movies? Well, no disrespect, but ever since Indiana Jones, we’ve been living in a world of B-movies with A-grade budgets and boardroom scrubbed content. Linking films up in a universe does not necessarily elevate them. No – not every single blockbuster is a B-movie or thematically empty – but yes, the vast majority are.
I digress. I’m a fan of the true modern B-movie. The one that actively conceals its budget. The kind whose biggest actor is “oh that’s the girl from that one show.” The kind where you might never even see the monster (again, budget!) But a quality B-movie always hits the minimums – plot, character arcs, and theme (all stripped down, but present) so that it can careen through its ludicrously entertaining set pieces and action sequences designed around its high concept (see, for example, a B-movie that does not hit the minimums).
And Escape Room comes with a high concept premise so perfect and dumb, you wonder why you didn’t make it first – “what if you were really in danger in an escape room?” Coming out in 2019, the film is a follow-on to the lineage of Cube and Saw and a predecessor to the death games as high art of Squid Game and Alice in Borderland.
However, as the odd PG-13 entry in this realm (sidebar: Misdommar might’ve been even scarier at PG-13, but that’s a different war), Escape Room lives and dies by the suspense it can generate in its rooms, which are fantastic, engrossing, and suitably devious. My vote for “best room” goes to the upside down room, but the heat room is a close second. On top of that, the characters vacillate between cooperation and sniping in unpredictable ways that pile on the tension.
And that unpredictability is ultimately what makes this grade-A B-movie. At a macro level, there’s no surprises. At a micro level, the home audience couldn’t help but shout at the screen:
“Not [redacted], they’re my favorite!”
“Who’s going down in this room?”
“How would that be dangerous?–Oh, I see.”
So, I’m probably not going to rewatch Escape Room to see if there’s a message about ultimate enlightenment. You don’t ride a roller coaster to consider your mortality. But I’ve ridden roller coasters twice, and the family will certainly be checking out the sequel.
