Six strangers get an invitation to an escape room with a $10,000 prize, the kind of premise that sounds like a knockoff and, for the first twenty minutes, kind of is. Then the rooms start actually trying to kill them, one clever, increasingly hostile set piece at a time, and Adam Robitel's film turns out to have more on its mind than body count. Taylor Russell, in one of her first major roles, grounds the chaos as the group's reluctant strategist.
The puzzles are the real star. An upside-down pool hall, a subzero cabin, an optical-illusion hallway: each room is a genuine design flex, escalating in scale and cruelty without ever feeling arbitrary. The ensemble is thinner than the sets, a few of these strangers exist mostly to die on schedule, but Logan Miller and Deborah Ann Woll get enough to work with that the stakes register beyond who solves the next lock combination.
The premise is dumb. The execution mostly isn't
It won't scare you and it won't linger, but as a Saturday-night popcorn thriller built on ingenuity rather than gore, it clears its bar with room to spare. The ending swings for franchise-building harder than the story earns, which knocks it down a notch. Still, 3.7 ears and two-thirds worth-your-time is a fair read on a movie that's smarter than its poster.
Escape Room was greenlit by Sony as director Adam Robitel's own franchise after his work on Insidious: The Last Key, with a script originally developed under the title The Maze by writers Maria Melnik and Bragi F. Schut. Filming took place in South Africa, standing in for the film's puzzle-box interiors. Robitel has said he deliberately steered the tone toward a PG-13 psychological thriller rather than the gorier register of films like Saw or Cube, wanting each themed room to feel like a genuine puzzle rather than a torture set piece. That approach paid off commercially, with the film earning well beyond its modest budget and quickly spinning off a 2021 sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions.
Compared to the grislier puzzle-horror it's often lumped in with, Escape Room leans closer to a theme-park thrill ride than a gore showcase, which is part of why it found a wide mainstream audience including younger horror fans. Its success turned a modest studio horror release into an ongoing franchise, with the sequel expanding the scope from a single building into sprawling outdoor traps across an entire city. It's a good fit for viewers who enjoy the premise and tension of escape-room culture itself, or who want horror-adjacent thrills without heavy violence, gore, or a slow, artsy pace.
Taylor Russell's career took off fast in the years right after Escape Room — she starred in Trey Edward Shults's Waves later that same year, then won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Best Young Actor or Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in Bones and All in 2022. It's an unusually prestigious trajectory for someone who spent her first major film role sprinting between elaborately murderous game-show sets, and it retroactively makes her the most interesting thing to come out of a movie mostly built around its production design.
