Escape the Field: Squid Game meets Maze Runner meets Escape Room

The streaming age is making it difficult for people to stumble across interesting things while scrolling through channels. It is not without merit, but the Lionsgate new horror-thriller Lionsgate B-programmer has been released. Escape the Field recreates that “What the hell isThis?” feeling by dropping viewers into a film without any of the annoying trappings of character establishment or world-building. This movie is Emerson Moore’s debut feature. It feels almost like watching a television series halfway through its second season. All the characters and relationships are established.

It feels like the premises are also disconnected.Escape the Field Combines In The Tall Grass’ setting, Escape Room’s structure, and Squid Game’s creative torture methods into something that’s bizarre, but familiar at the same time. It sounds like a game setup: Six people wake up and find themselves in an endless cornfield with no way to remember how they arrived there. Each of them has been given a tool, some of them more useful than others — shades of another probable inspiration, Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 cult classic Battle Royale. Each of those tools is engraved with a symbol, presumably the logo of the malevolent, all-powerful entity that’s holding them there.

In Fukasaku’s film, however, the “players” are given clear instructions for how to proceed in their game. Und in Squid Game the ruling entity’s sadistic intentions do eventually become entirely clear. This is not the case, as Sam, an overworked doctor, discovers after she awakens amid cornstalks in scrubs that she had fallen asleep in. Confounded, Sam wanders aimlessly and meets Tyler (Theo Rossi), an unthreatening father type who has also been trapped in this maze.

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The two make an alliance, which is expanded when they come across four more “players”: Stereotypical military man Ryan (Shane West), kvetching Pentagon contractor Denise (Elena Juatco), anxious computer programmer Cameron (Tahirah Sharif), and alarmingly pale prep-school student Ethan (Julian Feder). Ethan (Julian Feder) has the skin of a vampire. Twilight is one of this movie’s many unexplained mysteries.)

Unclear about whether they’re supposed to kill each other, work together, or what, the sextet decides they’re better off as a team. The sextet spends the night in the field, wandering among the unidentified beasties and sirens that occasionally go off. A couple of them are picked off over the next few days, but it doesn’t really matter. Each of the characters are given stock backgrounds to reference during moments of peril — being impaled on a fence reminds one of the girlfriend they always took for granted, for example. But all of their stories amount to little more than first-date-style “getting to know you” talk. And once a character is out of the narrative, it’s like they never existed at all.

Meanwhile, the remaining cast stays busy with tough-minded bickering á la basic-cable genre shows like The Walking Dead Its spin-offs. SyFy’s originality is only enhanced by the similarly constructed acting. There’s a lot of arguing about who’s in charge and how they’re going to get out of the field, peppered with thuddingly obvious expository dialogue where needed.

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Amid the chaos, Sam eventually figures out that the field itself is some sort of puzzle, which we know to be true because of the following exchange: “It’s a puzzle?” “Yes.” But don’t hold out for it to be solved in a conclusive or satisfying manner, as Escape the Field The mystery is further explored, and then the thought ends in mid-thought.

Escape the Field gets a marginal pass, for two reasons: First, it’s short, clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes. Second, it’s an original-ish concept, with no explicit ties to existing IP. (Although the ending does betray Moore’s thirst for a sequel.) Although efficiency and originality may be advantages in genre filmmaking but they should not overshadow the importance of creating an engaging world or characters that stimulate the imagination. These two qualities have been so underdeveloped.Escape the Field It feels like an episode in the middle of a season, and a series finale.

Escape the FieldThis film is currently in limited theatrical release. It can be rented or purchased digitally from AmazonThese and many other platforms.