No Escape takes a harsh look at the chasm between how people present themselves on social media and how they are in real life, exploring the harm done by conflating an influencer’s persona with reality. There aren’t a lot of new ideas in No Escape — it’s best described as Saw meets Hostel for the Instagram generation, with Die Hard and a couple of other films thrown in that would count as spoilers if they were mentioned by name. That doesn’t mean that it’s not entertaining or has nothing to say, though. No Escape argues that everyone wants to be an influencer, so you can never truly know a person or fully understand what they’re capable of doing.
Cole (Keegan Allen) is a social media streamer with a massive following. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of his popular “uPic” account ERL (#EscapeRealLife), which seeks to show followers unique and exclusive experiences they could never hope for in their own lives, Cole’s friends take him on a mystery trip to participate in their wildest adventure yet. They end up in Moscow to take part in a custom-built, extreme escape room. Cole’s a bit underwhelmed at first — in a meta nod to writer-director Will Wernick’s previous film Escape Room, Cole says that the whole escape room idea is a bit played out. However, once he’s locked in the elaborate compound and the countdown clock starts ticking, he realizes that this is no ordinary escape room and the dangers he and his friends are facing are very real.
Cole doesn’t come to this realization immediately though, and tensions mount as he vamps for the cameras that have conveniently been installed throughout the escape room compound. Rather than trying to work as fast as he can to save his friends from the torture devices they’re trapped in, he grins at his audience and narrates the horrors he’s witnessing — even pausing for dramatic effect and adopting an “Isn’t this crazy? What even is my life, right?” attitude. It’s one of the more clever and suspenseful touches in the film. The viewer, implicated by the fact that they’re watching this unfold just like Cole’s fictional audience, wants to scream at him to hurry up and solve all the puzzles before the timer runs out.
Of course, the timer does inevitably run out, and what follows is a twist that, while it may not come as a huge shock to the audience, will still satisfy. Cole and his friends are ceaseless clout-chasers. You can never tell what’s real and what’s artifice with them, so it only makes sense for the film to keep you disoriented and questioning the reality of what you’re watching. The film repeatedly mentions Cole’s inability to tell where his ERL persona ends and where his real self begins, and the true horror comes from watching Cole realize that these two identities are incompatible. He can only pick one, and he seems to keep making the wrong choice.
No Escape highlights the bizarre identity crisis that social media has wrought in the majority of people who use it. In a world where so many people live multiple lives — few (or possibly even none) of which are real — trust and belief become very dangerous things. We rely on social media to stay connected, but when false versions of ourselves connect with false versions of other people, what’s the point? The existential terror of this digital dissociation leaves the viewer wondering whether they should delete all their accounts, but like most social media users, they will ultimately reject the idea. The possibility of escaping real life is just too tempting.
