Why there's more to "Escape Room" then you might think

By now, the reviews are in for Escape Room. This (relatively) gore-free Saw knock off was put out in January, the traditional dumping ground for movies the studios don't expect to make any money. It currently stands at only 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's basically an "F", for those keeping track.

I'm not here to say that those reviewers are wrong. Escape Room is dumb. It is unapologetic about what it is and really doesn't aspire to any great intellectual statements about the human condition. This is not exactly Get Out is what I'm saying.

And yet there's a bit of unexpected brilliance in the movie. Unfortunately, this is impossible to discuss without giving away the ending so SPOILERS.

The movie's heroine is Zoey, played by Taylor Russel. Zoey is a socially withdrawn college student, who is prefers to spend time thinking about physics in her room than partying with her school mates. By all genre conventions, Zoey falls into that category  of stock horror character known as the "Final Girl."

As most horror fans know, the "Final Girl" is generally the virginal innocent female character whose purity is rewarded by surviving the movie. The "Final Girl" lives: everybody else dies except, of course, for the killer who returns in innumerable sequels.

Except in this movie, it's different. Near the end of the film, there are only two survivors of the game Zooey and Ben, played by Logan Miller. Zooey is able to escape one of the rooms, not by following the clues, but by tricking the people behind the game into believing she is dead. Given an opportunity to escape, however, she chooses to rescue Ben from the game, resulting in two survivors instead of one.

Many horror films would just stop there. However, Zoey is not content to count merely escaping as a win. Instead, she ends the film convincing Ben to help her pursue and stop the people behind the game. She's not content merely to survive the game: She refuses to cower helplessly from her tormentors.

And that make her something more than just a "Final Girl", who often only survive through luck and the demands of the script.  (Indeed, the movie has her reject the label, in a scene where she explicitly states that she does not want to be a sole survivor.) It makes her a heroic female character with a sense of agency, a rarity in horror. That' something that should be elaborated, even in a cheesy film like Escape Room.