No Escape (also known as Follow Me) is a diverting but ultimately forgettable critique of social media and the drive for sensational material.
Synopsis: A social media personality travels with his friends to Moscow to capture new content for his successful VLOG. Always pushing the limits and catering to a growing audience, they enter a cold world of mystery, excess, and danger.
So often, we look at opportunities to expand stories, despite some stories perhaps fitting into a much shorter period. In some ways, No Escape feels like a narrative that would play out far more effectively in a shorter format. The desire to fill a feature run-time means introducing credibility-stretching aspects that threaten to derail tension.
Opening on a plane, mid-flight we are soon introduced in lively fashion to Cole (Keegan Allen), a social media personality on his way to Moscow as a celebration for 10 years of his vlogging channel. Cole’s channel has seemingly changed from the everyday to increasingly more extreme experiences like being buried alive. Fellow vlogger Dash (George Janko) has arranged a unique ‘escape room’ experience for the group which he promises will make for a perfect anniversary video. Also along for the experience are Sam (Siya), an X-Games athlete, long-term estranged friend Thomas (Denzel Whitaker) and Cole’s girlfriend, Erin (Holland Roden).
Cole’s brand of high-intensity vlogging is characterised by his #escapereallife slogan. As the film unfolds we learn that Cole has lived a life almost entirely on-camera as a child and the vlogging is an extension of that and his wider personality. Erin, however, is tired of Cole’s vlog-persona and the artifice it brings. A scene where his instinct to engage with fans and online viewers sees him ignore that Erin may be in danger enhances the sense of tension between them. The cast are all good, even though they are relatively thinly-written. Despite Allen’s strong performance as Cole, there is still a sense that the only thing you know about him is that he has a YouTube persona. There just isn’t enough of his ‘other’ side shown to grasp what Erin is looking to see more of. Cole’s online persona is bold and showy, but his experiences tend to put him, rather than others in harms way. He is quieter off-camera, but there’s just not enough contrast there to give the relationship a sense of unease.
The setup is good, but unfortunately, the actual time spent in the escape room setting shows the film’s flaws. The puzzles don’t feel clearly defined and there is a lack of suspense. Part of this is due to the film playing a few cards too early on. I don’t say this as someone who often guesses where films are heading (just the opposite, in fact), but the film telegraphs fairly early on where it is headed. The proliferation of escape room themed films (this film’s director and writer Will Wernick made one in 2017) and the legacy of Saw mean that it is difficult to put anything particularly new on screen, but these just don’t feel that compelling. Despite letting on too soon the film still plays out like many other escape room/trap scenarios for an hour of run time which have any suspense diffused.
Wernick weaves a few more sophisticated writing elements in, including a recurring reference to Die Hard although it would be nice to see the performer’s capabilities stretched a little more with some extra nuance. The direction is level headed but at times can feel a bit off-the-shelf, without any kind of trademark or steering quality. There is a pleasantly nasty sting to this, which could set it apart, if it could abandon that high-gloss, slickness that leads it to appear quite generic. The actual commentary on the demands we increasingly place on content creators and how that often turns to a desire to see them punished is well delivered.
Solid, without being ground-breaking, No Escape struggles to explore its premise with enough depth to sustain the runtime, leading to a film of two halves that don’t quite fit together.
3 out of 5 stars
No Escape is now available on digital and VOD.
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