No Exit

No Exit

2022

Trailer

Getting caught up on my 31 Days, 31 Horror Movies reviews.

No Exit came out in February to basically no fanfare at all. Adapted from a novel I’d never heard of, and not the Sartre play of the same name - although it does have a tiny cast of strangers in an isolated location so could probably be a play too.

It centres on Darby, an addict in rehab to avoid jail time when she receives a call that her mother’s in hospital and leaves without permission, and then gets stuck in a snowstorm with a handful of other people in a park visitors’ centre. And then discovers one of the vehicles in the parking lot has a child bound and gagged inside.

Directed by Damien Power, maker of the Australian kidnap horror-thriller Killing Ground, this is also a kidnap gone wrong in a dangerous isolated environment. It plays like a mystery to begin with before shifting into a thriller that plays like a mostly serious take on the Coen Brothers or Fiasco RPG “desperate people making things worse” crime subgenre, and like them it includes some really nasty violence once it ramps up, some wince-inducing and some gallows humour, and it has some “oh really?” twists, but it’s a much more humane film than Killing Ground (which I found pretty unpleasant) and I liked it overall.

Disney+ Star here, Hulu in the US. In the Halloween section rather than the Horror section, which seems wrong.