"No Exit" Movie Review - Hermetic thriller in the spirit of Agatha Christie novels and Shyamalan films
A nifty genre exercise to help you get through the winter
Upon learning that her mother is near death, Darby (Havana Rose Lew) escapes the rehab, steals a car and goes to a sick relative through a web of freeways and forks. The girl's plans are spoiled by a blizzard: the roads are blocked, the police advise all motorists to find shelter, and the heroine has no choice but to stop at the local tourist information center. There, she'll spend the night with perfect strangers: an ex-Marine (Dennis Haysbert), his wife (Dale Dickey), a humble, handsome man (Danny Ramirez) and a frightening autistic boy (David Rysdael). Trying to get in touch, Darby goes outside and sees a girl tied up in one of the cars. One of the four is a criminal, and now she must find out who owns the van and how to save the prisoner.
The No Exit scenario is such a familiar genre construct that its echoes can be seen in dozens of other plots. A snow-covered hut with suspicious faces is the setting of Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, the search for a psychopath among those around is the backbone of Agatha Christie's novels, and the crazy plot twists that await the viewer in the second half are a declaration of love for M. Night Shyamalan's bizarre thrillers. You have seen this movie a hundred times, but even the hundred and first it invariably intrigues and makes you glance nervously at your watch.
The story here develops according to a good genre manual. The heroine is burdened with a serious injury, and the confrontation with the criminal must be mirrored by her internal conflict - drug addiction, which destroyed not only Darby's life, but the future of her entire family. The suspects from the tourist center, as it turns out, are also not so simple: behind the masks of family men, freaks and alpha males, there is either a personal tragedy or an evil grimace. It is not surprising that “No Exit” is a film adaptation of the novel - the plot lines and the actions of the characters are too interconnected, one event leads to another, even more expected, too logically.
For this predictability of “No Exit”, perhaps, one can even condescendingly scold - but is there any point? Damien Power's film is overly synthesized, devoid of all life and plot ingenuity: it was nurtured not in the mind of the author-demiurge, but in a sealed studio test tube. And yet, in its artificiality, you can also find charm. If revisionist directors are juggling cliches and reinventing the genre, then here we are talking more about repairing an old structure. Assembling a spectacular attraction that makes fun of templates is actually no more difficult than making a rusted wreck work.
And Damien Power suddenly finds herself on the move. Maybe with a little shaking and slowing down halfway, but No Escape gets to its destination without obvious accidents. Closer to the finale, the snow in the entire area turns crimson, the characters die one by one, and it becomes completely difficult to distinguish friends from strangers. Given that the events of the film unfold during a snowstorm, this movie can be called a terrible hymn to the outgoing winter: nature, like sad heroes, will transform and bloom, and somewhere, far from the permafrost, there will always be hope for the best. At the end of such a frisky attraction, a bit of positive existential poetry will not be superfluous.
Comments