SyFy vs The Mynd: No Escape Room (2018)

The car of a squabbling father/daughter duo (Mark Ghanimé and Jeni Ross) breaks down somewhere in small town USA. Because these things can take their time, they decide to search what goes under “excitement” in the area while their car is being repaired. As it happens, there’s an escape room happening in town, so our protagonists soon find themselves teaming up with three other poor horror film victims, solving puzzles and encountering increasingly peculiar things in a somewhat creepy old house.

In these sad, post-Sharknado times, when seemingly all of the handful of SyFy Originals still produced in a year apparently need to be “ironic” and/or about sharks, or are so atrocious I can’t even bring myself to write them up most of the time, Alex Merkin’s No Escape Room feels like a breath of fresh air by sheer virtue of being none of the above things. Instead it is a simple, yet slick looking little low budget movie that goes through with its basic concept from beginning to finish in a convincing and professional manner. That sounds like I’m damning with faint praise again, but really, giving the SyFy Original movie output of the last few years, being a film that’s actively avoiding being crap is something of a triumph. Why, when watching this, it’s not difficult to believe that Merkin and writer Jesse Mittelstadt actually care about their audience having a good time watching this. Sure, elements of the film feel a bit like a lite version of “No End House”, but there’s nothing wrong with borrowing from the good stuff.

While it probably won’t rock your world, this little film is well realized on a craftsmanship level, using the artificiality of escape rooms and their structure well to pace its plot and get its characters to interact naturally, slowly escalating things into a somewhat weirder direction. Merkin’s directorial style is slick enough to mostly play over the fact that most of his film is taking place in only a handful of small rooms, and he certainly knows how to introduce weird elements to the plot with small gestures. Personally, I’m also rather fond of how little direct explanation No Escape Room gives for the nature of its supernatural threat, but then I’m also sure that’s an element of the film that’ll drive viewers with different tastes batty.


Me, I had quite a bit of fun with this one, and when was the last time I could write something like that about a new SyFy movie?