Escape Room

Christen (Elisabeth Hower) has a surprise for her boyfriend Tyler (Evan Williams) and their friends. For his 30th birthday party, she has booked them into the most exclusive game in town: Escape Room, an underground interactive experience in which teams are locked together in a room and given one hour to untangle a series of cryptic clues in order to secure their freedom. Though tensions among the friends begin percolating as soon as the doors are locked, they must work together to solve a series of increasingly difficult challenges whose answers prove to be literally life or death. ("Fuck this puzzle!" cries out one of the frustrated players in the face of certain death.) Based on one of the biggest crazes in decades - invented in Japan in 2007, over 900 escape-room attractions have opened in the U.S. since 2014 - director Will Wernick's devilishly clever and claustrophobic horror thriller borrows some elements of the disturbing Saw franchise and marries them with ingeniously creative puzzles, even more creative kills, and a ticking clock of doom. (Seattle International Film Festival)