Escape Room (2019)

Escape Room is a film so committed to the mechanical pursuit of puzzle-solving that it forgets to make any statement whatsoever about the world it depicts. The ensemble cast, drawn from various ethnic and ability backgrounds, functions as interchangeable cogs in a corporate death trap, which is exactly what a corporate death trap requires. The film's nominal anti-capitalist setting, a facility designed to extract money from desperate participants, never develops into actual critique. Instead, the machinery of plot consumes all thematic possibility, grinding forward with the singular purpose of creating tense scenarios and jump scares. The characters exist as collections of skills and vulnerabilities, useful for solving puzzles and generating suspense, not as vessels for any particular cultural consciousness. This is filmmaking in service of narrative momentum, which happens to include people of different races and abilities without bothering to make anything of that fact. One watches with the sense of observing a perfectly functional machine that was never intended to say anything interesting about the world it inhabits. The film achieves a kind of purity through its complete disinterest in cultural commentary, which is to say it achieves nothing at all in that regard.