A group of six strangers take up the invitation of an escape room with the promise of $10,000 to anyone who can succeed.

Up until the last five minutes of this film my thoughts were that it was a relatively interesting, if hugely generic “horror” film. The word horror in inverted commas because it’s not remotely scary. And then the final few minutes were so aggressively cynical in its attempts to set up a franchise all of my good will evaporated.

Bizarrely it opens with a sequence of one of our group trying to escape a room solo before jumping back three days. It’s an odd thing to do given it acts as a spoiler for its own story. But I can see why they did it given the next 20 minutes are boring set up for some (but not all) of our protagonists. I can only assume they cut the other introductions to try and get to the main bulk of the story quicker or to attempt to throw suspicion on those not introduced. Either way, once we actually arrive in the escape rooms we are at the most interesting section of the film. It is purely the ingenuity of the death traps that is the fun in this film.

Of course, fans of the Saw franchise or even the Cube trilogy might have something to say about its originality.