Escape Room is a 2019 psychological thriller inspired by the Saw franchise starring Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Deborah Ann Woll, and Tyler Labine. It released on January 4, 2019.
Six strangers, each the sole survivor of various horrific disasters, are invited to test their wits against an immersive escape room in downtown Chicago. They soon learn that the rooms contain deadly traps and that they are being watched by a sadistic unseen "game master,” and must work together to overcome the trials of each room or suffer the consequences.
A sequel, Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, was released on July 16th, 2021.
Neither this film or its sequel has any relation to Escape Room (2017), although they feature similar concepts.
This film provides examples of:
- Absurdly High-Stakes Game: The price for failing to figure out the escape puzzles is death. And painful death at that.
- Accidental Murder:
- In the hospital room, because of a clue that an optimal heart rate will open the way out, Jason defibrillates Michael in hopes of artificially raising his heart rate. Unfortunately, the clue actually meant the heart rate had to be lowered instead, so Jason just ends up accidentally killing Michael.
- Likewise, Ben didn't intend to kill Jason in their scuffle over the antidote, only pushing his head into a corner inadvertently.
- All for Nothing: Unfortunately, and ironically, death is the prize for winning this life-or-death game.
- Always Save the Girl: Minor example, but in the very first escape room where the heat has been turned up to fatal levels, Danny tells Zoey to hurry up and escape the room, even though this will decrease Danny's own chances of survival. Ben accuses Danny of only letting Zoey go first as a ploy to get female attention. Danny is nonplussed by the accusation; the movie leaves it ambiguous whether Ben is correct or whether Danny was legitimately being nice. Also, as another minor example, Ben later insists (when it looks like Zoey died in the hospital puzzle room) that he should have forced her to come with him when escaping to the next room so she could have lived.
- And the Adventure Continues: The film ends with Zoey and Ben preparing to go after the shadowy organization that created the escape rooms, while the organization themselves prepare for their arrival.
- And You Thought It Was a Game: When the cast signs up for the escape rooms, they are taken to a waiting room under the impression that they're going to be playing a simple game and take a chance at winning $10,000. Then the waiting room not only turns out to be the first escape room, it almost kills them with real heat and flames. This causes everyone to realize that these escape rooms are fatal—except Danny, who thinks it's just a more immersive game than usual since everyone made it out of the room alive and unharmed. Then Danny dies in the icy cold room, the first death of the group as well, which really drives home that this isn't just a game.
- Artificial Outdoors Display: The second deadly chamber is dressed up to look like a coniferous forest in winter, complete with trees and an iced-over pond. Played with in that the entrance to this "outdoor" area is dressed up to look like a rustic cabin, simulating an indoor environment within an Artificial Outdoors Display, enclosed inside an entirely different building.
- Asshole Victim: The Game Master, as well as Jason by the time his role in the film is done.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- The icy cold room at first appears easier than the heater room before it, since while the group is in danger of catching hypothermia if they stay in this room too long, at least there are no devices artificially changing the temperature this time, so there is apparently no time limit. Then it turns out the real threat comes from the ice beneath their feet, since it's loaded with landmine-type explosives to make random - or not so random, in Danny's case - holes in it.
- The players find repeat references to a "Dr. Wootan Yu", which Danny speculates is the name of some sort of Mad Scientist who designed all the rooms. In fact, the name refers to no individual in particular, and is just an anagram for "No Way Out", a clue that there were supposed to be no survivors in the end. Neither the Game Master or his superior are given a name.
- Big Bad: The Game-Master. Though according to him, he's just a local supervisor who doesn't actually design the games; the Minos organization he works for is the Greater-Scope Villain, which is led by an unidentified shadowy figure.
- Big Damn Heroes: The game-master tries to strangle Ben to death so Ben won't talk about the escape rooms to the outside world. Then Zoey suddenly arrives and saves him, having earlier stolen a gun from the cleanup crew when they came to dispose of her seemingly dead body.
- Bilingual Bonus: The study, which is the room shown in the cold open and the final room of the challenge, has Latin phrases inscribed on the walls that foreshadow how the game is created to be unwinnable and none of the players are meant to survive. "Acta est fabula" means "the play is over", "mors mihi lucrum" means "death is my reward", and "mors vincit omnia" translates to "death always wins".
- Bizarrchitecture: The various escape rooms seen in the film should not all be able to fit into a single building in downtown Chicago, but Minos Escape Rooms makes it happen, somehow. The third room in particular, which is built inside an elevator shaft, looks to be absurdly high up for a 12-story building.
- Black Dude Dies First: Indian nerd Danny is the first player to die.
- Bolivian Army Ending: The ending reveals that Ben and Zoey’s flight to New York itself is an escape room trap, giving them only a 4% chance of survival. Of course, with such low chances, no one believes they will be able to survive the puzzle.
- Bollywood Nerd: Danny is Indian and a dorky escape room enthusiast who the other cast members mock for his presumed lack of success with the opposite sex.
- Born Lucky: Appears to be the game masters’ assessment of Ben, since his survival during his own accident was the most luck-based, hence he was given the worst odds of survival. They’re the player who ends up “winning.”
- Breather Level: The second room lacks any immediate danger that we get to see in the brief time it takes the protagonists to solve it, being protected by two very simple lock puzzles. The first part is a cozy cabin with no observable time limit, although the second part is a frozen landscape where the real danger is catching hypothermia if they stay too long. There is a trap in the room in the form of landmines rigged to the ice, but these are only activated after they find the exit, or if they try to cheat.
- Bring It: The Minos logo is itself a puzzle whose solution gives the exact latitude and longitude of their headquarters in New York, inviting Zoey and Ben to come confront them. The final scene of the film is them being delighted at the prospect, declaring "let's play again!"
- Cassandra Truth: The police don't believe Zoey's story about the escape room, since all evidence has been removed from the building and the only other corroborating witness was found with illegal drugs in his system. A distressed Zoey gives a scream of frustration at this as she stares at the now-empty building room.
- Catapult Nightmare: Zoey launches up covered in sweat from her nightmare about the plane crash she survived. Based on her roommate's reaction, this wasn't the first time it's happened.
- Character Development:
- Zoey begins the movie as shy and timid, barely even speaking to the group, and in the very first escape room she's the one who accidentally turns on the heat. But as the movie goes on she becomes bolder and more competent at finding clues, even offering encouragement to the others. She even fakes her own death to trick the cleanup crew into arriving so she can steal a gun from them and escape the game on her own terms. She ends up saving her own life by doing this as the next room Ben and Jason escape to only allowed for one survivor. Then she saves Ben's life from the game-master and, at the end of the movie, she insists on going after the organization behind the game because she's "done running."
- Ben begins the movie as an unkempt, depressed alcoholic unable to even get a promotion at his grocery store job to the checkout counter (Ben admits he has 'poor customer service skills'). He not only takes several levels of kindness during the game, but despite being given the lowest odds of survival, Ben is the one who wins the escape room in the traditional manner. When he meets back up with Zoey at the end of the movie six months later, he's cleaned up, shaven, appears to have quit drinking, mentions seeing a therapist, and has been promoted to Assistant Manager of Sales at his new job at a pet food company. Even though he has clear PTSD from his traumas, he also agrees to join Zoey in her quest to go after the organization behind the game.
- Cheated Death, Died Anyway: Invoked in-universe. All of the main characters are revealed to have survived earlier incidents only to be killed off one by one in each room after the first. The Big Bad purposely chose them to, in Zoey's words, "see who's the luckiest of the lucky."
- Chekhov's Gun: Ben's flask, which enables Ben and Danny to escape the oven room, by using the contents to replace the water Amanda drunk, and thus weigh down all six coasters to keep the hatch open. Averted with Ben's lighter; he tosses Danny his lighter so the others can use it to melt the ice around the key to the door out. But as soon as Danny catches it, the GM explodes the ice underneath Danny, killing him, so the lighter can't be used.
- Clarke's Third Law: The game masters are able to do nigh-impossible things with the technology at their disposal, all for the sake of their escape rooms.
- Cleanup Crew: Late in the movie, one is shown clearing out the completed rooms. And are presumably the ones responsible for the building being completely emptied out by the time Zoey leads the police there.
- Cooked to Death: The first room, made to appear like a waiting room, is in fact an oven-like death trap. If the players turn a temperature dial on the door to 451 (which isn't even necessary to beat the room), giant fans start blowing hot air and the ceiling and walls will slowly turn into massive oven coils and the chandelier into a top-down gas stove.
- Dark Horse Victory: The Game Master admits that Ben, the only person to get through all the rooms in the traditional way, thus making him the "winner", was given the lowest odds of survival.
- Death Course: The escape rooms in this film are a set of interconnected rooms with varying hazards, puzzles, and time limits. Some can be solved with no casualties, while others are designed to only let one or two survivors make it out.
- Death Glare: Amanda gives Ben one when he starts to claim her military service could be cause for suspecting her of running the deadly game. He only mumbles out the rest of the sentence.
- Decoy Protagonist: Zoey's face is on the poster, yet she dies 3 rooms from the end, leaving Ben as the main protagonist who survives the rest of the rooms. Except not really, as Zoey faked her death so that she could get the jump on the people who put them all into these death traps, and shows up at the end to save Ben.
- Desperate Object Catch: Amanda misses catching the 8-ball doorknob when it falls out of her pocket in the inverted bar room. Then Jason successfully catches the same crucial object when Amanda retrieves it from the remaining floor/ceiling piece and tosses it to the others.
- Detachable Doorknob: Inverted; the door leading outside the upside-down pool room doesn't have a knob, so the group has to try and find one to escape.
- Developing Doomed Characters: The film goes to great lengths to explain the backstories of all the players of the escape rooms, including the ones who end up dying in them and are never seen again physically in the sequel.
- Disney Death: Zoey seems to have suffocated in the hospital room, but used an oxygen mask to survive.
- Divide and Conquer: While in the ice room, when the group only find one cold-weather jacket, Amanda assumes that the game designers are trying to invoke this, proclaiming out loud that they will all share the jacket and giving it to Zoey first as she's the youngest and least well-equipped of the group with the understanding that she'll pass it on later. Later revealed that the jacket was actually intended to call back to Jason's survival story where he was the last survivor of a shipwreck wearing a similar jacket.
- Dramatic Irony: Before the plot gets rolling, Ben responds to Amanda eyeing his cigarette with "it's gonna kill me, I know" before they head into the escape room. Viewers know he was referring to the wrong thing in that sentence.
- Dwindling Party: After the first room, every room claims a member until Ben is the only one playing.
- Faking the Dead: Zoey apparently goes crazy in the hospital room, attacking the walls and cameras instead of solving the puzzle and escaping with Ben and Jason. Ben attempts to convince her to come with them as they escape to the next room, but she insists on being left behind. She apparently dies of carbon monoxide poisoning and collapses to the floor, motionless. It turns out that there was an oxygen mask nearby she could have used to avoid being poisoned, but she intentionally let the people watching the escape rooms think she died so they would arrive to clean up the evidence. The first chance she gets, she knocks them out and steals a gun to escape the game on her own terms.
- Fingore: Narrowly averted. In the icy cold room, the key to the door out is frozen in a large block of ice. Once the attempt to use Ben's lighter is foiled (by Danny being dropped through the ice while holding it) the group need to use body heat - starting with their hands - to melt the ice. Surprisingly, none of the group suffer ice burns, chilblains or frostbite from doing so.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing:
- When Ben finds the hallucinogen antidote and the label that it only has one dose, implying they're about to have to fight over it. He doesn't even get a chance to tell Jason the situation before Jason tackles him for it.
- Zoey's oxygen mask setup is shown and commented on by the cleanup crew seconds before she gets up and attacks them.
- We get a shot of the wood shard embedded in Ben's leg shortly before he uses it to defend himself from the game master.
- Foreshadowing:
- When Amanda arrives at the Minos building, we get a look at her driver's license, which gives her address as 5063 Camp Butler Rd, Springfield Il. This is the address to the Camp Butler national cemetery.
- The first room's magazines all portray deadly fires, foreshadowing the room's hazard.
- Amanda comments on how Zoey looks familiar to her and asks if she's been on TV. Zoey says no and shrugs it off. Zoey is later revealed to have been the Sole Survivor of a plane crash she and her mother were on. She was stuck in the wilderness for a week before being found by rescuers. The rest of the group realizes this is why she looked familiar; her survival story made the news.
- In the freezing room, the movie emphasizes Jason taking notice of Zoey wearing the only jacket available, and later he insists on wearing it. Guess what really happened the last time Jason and another person had only one jacket available.
- Despite Jason's friend being described as suffering from the symptoms of hypothermia, he is the one depicted wearing the coat, not Jason.
- When Ben is getting chewed out by the remaining members of the group for indirectly causing Danny's death in Room 2 and they accuse him of possibly being the game master, he defends himself by pointing out how all of them are just as suspicious in different ways. When he gets to Jason, he claims he comes off like American Psycho. He is more right then he realizes. And while Jason being just as bad as Patrick Bateman is debatable, its clear that he murdered his roommate and stole his red jacket to survive that night when they were stranded at sea in the cold; completely disregarding his friend just to save himself. He becomes increasingly worse during the actual game, ending as a ranting Social Darwinist who is willing to kill the entire team for the same reason.
- The casualness with which the scoreboard changes to reflect Ben escaping the game master, Zoey reappearing, and the game master's death indicates that Minos never truly lost control of the situation.
- A couple of clues mention a Dr. Wootan Yu. Zoey realizes upon returning that this was an anagram for "no way out", foreshadowing in-universe that the game wasn't meant to be escaped.
- Fission Mailed: When Ben has to use a code to unlock a door to prevent the library walls from crushing him to death, when this scene is played at the beginning of the movie the code apparently doesn't work, and we cut to the opening credits as Ben is about to be crushed. When we see this scene again later in the movie, it turns out the code actually did work, it just unlocked the fireplace instead, so Ben has to crawl into the fireplace to escape the crushing wall, and the fireplace turns out to be the real way out.
- Gas Chamber: The fourth room is a combination of different hospital rooms from the player's pasts; if they fail to figure out the puzzle within a few minutes, the room will fill with carbon monoxide.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The head of the Minos organization, revealed to be named Henry in the sequel's extended cut. Here, he only appears as an obscured face on a computer screen.
- He Knows Too Much: The victor of the games is usually executed for this reason. However, after Ben and Zoey escape, they cover up the evidence effectively and leave them alive for round 2.
- Heroic Sacrifice: In the "upside-down pool room", Amanda intentionally lets herself fall to her death in order to retrieve the 8-ball doorknob and toss it to the party, so the party won't spend precious minutes trying to save her.
- Hidden Villain: The people responsible for the game. While the Game Master appears after Ben escapes the final room, his superior is only ever shown as a shadowy figure on screens, with a digitally distorted voice.
- Hologram: Used in the winter room for the illusion of an open sky and in the plane simulation for designing the puzzle Ben and Zoey will face on their flight to New York City.
- Hologram Projection Imperfection: The hologram fizzles and glitches temporarily when Danny touches it.
- How We Got Here: The movie opens with Ben alone in the final room and seemingly about to die before flashing back to three days prior when the players first received their game invites.
- Irony: None of the players died in the rooms designed with them in mind. And the fact that the winner who survives every room against all odds is rewarded... with death.
- Jerkass: Jason thinks very highly of himself, but his arrogance and rudeness towards Ben and Danny, along with dismissing Amanda as "weak" after she sacrifices herself, just makes him come across as an asshole. This foreshadows his eventual decision to forfeit the lives of the other players.
- Karma Houdini: Minos escapes the film unscathed except for losing a couple of staff and the cost of cleanup and coverup. While Ben and Zoey intend to remedy this, Minos' opening shot in "round 2" is one they calculate to have a mere 4% chance of survival.
- Kick the Dog: Beyond the obvious of putting them in a death trap, tailoring the rooms to play off of each player's trauma is a cruel touch that a few of the players non-verbally acknowledge as such. The game master even asserts that Ben's drunk driving accident makes him the same!
- Magical Defibrillator: Completely averted, and perhaps even inverted, as the EKG in the hospital puzzle is used to kill one of the players.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: How the people behind the game cover up the deaths of anyone who fail to survive it. Which is supposed to be all of them.
- Meaningful Name: Minos Escape Rooms, after the Greek king who commissioned the Labyrinth that kept the Minotaur imprisioned. Turns out this Labyrinth is just as deadly, too.
- Mind Screw: The seizure-inducing second-to-last room, where the players are poisoned with a contact hallucinogen, and must find an antidote before losing their minds.
- Many of the escape rooms are this, to an extent, especially the snow-covered cabin and the 8-Ball Room.
- The Mole: Subverted. When Ben accidentally causes Danny's death, the others suspect him of being the Game Master, having entered as a contestant. He points out that the others in the group are even more suspicious than he is, and indeed, none of them turn out to be the Game Master. The villain is just some random guy no one has seen before. Plus, the audience has already been given a look into Ben's self-esteem issues and Soul-Sucking Retail Job before he enters the game, making the accusation a case of Dramatic Irony.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Ben is not happy when he inadvertently causes Danny’s death. This results in his Took a Level in Kindness as he then begins to take the game seriously and puts forth an effort to help anyone he can to survive.
- Nebulous Evil Organisation: Minos.
- Nerves of Steel: Jason is far calmer and collected than the rest of the players. This isn't the first time he's been in a deadly situation where survival was in his own hands. And his sole goal is to survive by any means necessary.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Ben killing the game master removes a key piece of evidence that could have helped a police investigation. The sentence of Zoey's that the gunshot cut off might even have been her telling him not to.
- Not Helping Your Case: When Ben is accused of being the game master, he endears himself to the others by accusing each of them in turn. Jason points out it doesn't matter anyway, what they need to focus on is solving the puzzles to get out of the maze.
- Not Quite the Right Thing: In the hospital room, because of a clue that the optimal EKG rate will open the way out, Jason defibrillates Michael in order to artificially raise his heart rate. Not only does this accidentally kill Michael, but it turns out what actually opens the escape route is a low heart rate instead of a high one. The correct solution is for Jason to attach the electrodes to himself, and then allow himself to be poisoned just enough to lower his heart rate and open the escape route.
- "Not So Different" Remark: The game master asserts that Ben accidentally killing his friends while driving drunk gives him no room to call the game master a psychopath for putting people through torturous death games. Really.
- Once More, with Clarity: The flashbacks to Jason and his friend stuck on their capsized boat, and how he's the one who managed to survive.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Michael suggests trying the code 1234 on the 8-ball barroom's lockbox, just to rule it out. It doesn't work. He later suggests 1111.
- Pet the Dog: The Minos employee who checks everybody in and takes their cellphones stops to thank Amanda for her military service, knowing full well that she's being lured into a death trap.
- Plot Tailored to the Party: Not only do the rooms play into each of the players' traumas, but they are designed with their knowledge and capabilities in mind as well, such as Ben's knowledge of sign language and Jason being able to operate an EKG. To elaborate:
- The first room turns into a giant oven that incinerates anyone who can't escape in time, playing into Amanda's PTSD as she's the sole survivor of an IED blast during the Iraq war.
- The second room is an indoor icy forest, referring to Jason who survived being stuck in the middle of the cold oceans. It even has the same red jacket Jason used to survive the icy winds before being rescued, and he had to share it with other people. It also has a log cabin the players have to get out of first, the puzzle in it referencing the song Ben and his friends listened to before he got into his car accident.
- The third room is an upside-down bar and pool room, where the players have to solve the puzzles before the floor tiles beneath them collapse and cause them to fall to their deaths. Zoey is the sole survivor of a plane crash that ended with the wrecked aircraft flipped upside down. The room may also refer to how Ben was driving drunk before he crashed.
- The fourth room is a giant hospital room, with six bedrooms tailored exactly to match the hospital rooms the players were admitted to after they had survived a deadly accident; equipment, files and everything. The room itself will kill them all with carbon monoxide if they don't get out in time, referring to Danny who was a sole survivor of a carbon monoxide poisoning that killed his entire family.
- The fifth room is a black-and-white psychedelic mess, with a hatch door handle that poisons anyone touching it with a hallucinogen. Ben was driving drunk when his car crashed, killing all his friends but leaving him alive. Fitting how he ends up surviving the room.
- The final room is a library with a slowly advancing wall, forcing the players to solve the puzzles in it before the wall crushes them to death. Mike was the sole survivor of a cave-in that crushed him and all of his friends; he was the only one found alive while the others had suffocated.
- Rewatch Bonus: with the added bonus that you'll only see it if you watch the extra scenes on the DVD/Blu-ray release. In the first room, Amanda finds and shudders at an article with the headline "Five dead in fire". When Ben talks to the Game Master after escaping the labyrinth, the GM remarks that one of the previous games featured college athletes. During the penultimate scene, Zoey shows Ben fake articles that detail how Danny, Amanda, Mike and Jason 'died'. On the DVD/Blu-ray, the alternative opening shows four college soccer players and their coach in a Spanish-speaking country, who don't manage to get out of the first room before the oven dial in the door flicks to 'broil' and the chandelier sets the entire room on fire: as a bonus, they couldn't have escaped the room to begin with even if they managed to figure it out since one of them managed to break off the screwdriver handle by trying to use it to force the receptionist window open and another one of them drank one of the water bottles in the vending machine and it's doubtful they had anything to replace it with like Ben did.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Danny, the escape room enthusiast who has done many of these puzzles before, is the very first fatality, driving home to the audience that these escape rooms are genuinely fatal.
- Schmuck Bait: In a room containing magazines all portraying deadly fires and books about burning, the players are subtly invited to turn the oven dial beneath the broken door handle to turn the room into a literal oven. Careful examination shows that it's entirely possible to make it through the room without ever activating the trap. Similarly, the water fountain that players would naturally be tempted to drink from to deal with the heat has an exact water level needed to escape the room alive (unless you snuck in a hip flask).
- Senseless Sacrifice: Mike dies when Jason uses a defibrillator on him, believing that a high heart rate will open the door to the next room...but because a low rate was what was required, Mike's death was ultimately meaningless.
- Serial Escalation: Not the rooms themselves, which don't necessarily follow a linear difficulty progression, but the next "puzzle room" Ben and Zoey face will be the passenger jet that's operating the MIA-NYC flight they're booked on.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Amanda turns out to be a former soldier who survived an explosion in Iraq, but that explosion killed everyone else in her unit; only Amanda survived. Amanda periodically experiences PTSD symptoms because of this, most notably in the escape vent that leads out of the first escape room, where Amanda briefly freezes and has to be talked into continuing forward by Zoey.
- Sinister Surveillance: The players are watched at all times by whoever is running the game. Zoey’s gambit in the hospital room is dependent on removing said asset from play.
- The Social Darwinist: Jason has mild shades of this, as every time someone dies, he encourages just quickly moving on and surviving instead of taking even a minute to mourn. Also, while he initially tells the party that his college roommate just swam off and was never seen again after their boat overturned, Ben later figures out that Jason actually murdered his roommate so he could survive using the only jacket available.
- Sole Survivor: Each of the players is the sole survivor of a horrific accident. It turns out that this is why they were all chosen — the people behind the game want to see whether it was luck or skill which enabled this, and which of them is the most capable survivor. To be more specific:
- Amanda was a soldier in Iraq, but an IED explosion killed her entire unit; only Amanda survived the blast.
- Ben was driving drunk in order to take his friends out on a joyride, but they got into a car accident that killed everyone except Ben himself.
- Danny is the only survivor of carbon monoxide poisoning that killed his entire family.
- Jason and his college roommate's boat overturned while in the middle of the ocean; only Jason survived between the two. He claimed that his roommate swam off towards land that wasn't there during a delusional episode. But Ben eventually realizes that this is a lie; Jason actually murdered his college roommate so he could use their shared jacket to survive.
- Michael and his fellow miners were trapped in a cave-in. Michael had to listen to his fellow miners suffocate, with only Michael himself being successfully pulled out of the cave-in.
- Zoey was in a plane that crashed, killing everyone else aboard, including her mother. Only Zoey survived the accident after being stranded in the wilderness for a week and eventually being found.
- Averted at the end, when Ben initially seems to be the only survivor of the party, before Zoey reveals she was Faking the Dead just in time to save him.
- Tank-Top Tomboy: Amanda, an Iraq War veteran who is the clear Action Girl of the film's two female characters, is dressed like this.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted Trope. Ben mentions to have been getting therapy to deal with his ordeal in the escape room.
- There Can Be Only One: The seizure/hallucinogen room is designed to invoke this. While the players are free to proceed through the hatch immediately after opening it, they're stuck with the severely debilitating effects of the hallucinogen, and there is only a single dose of the antidote available, which all but ensures that a fight will ensue among the remaining players for that one dose.
- This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: When the Cleanup Crew reaches the hospital room, they see an oxygen mask hooked up to an outlet and wonder what Zoey was trying to do. The Not Quite Dead Zoey then says "Breathe, bitch!" before attacking them.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Ben isn't impressed when he walks into the first room, muttering under his breath that "this is going to suck".
- Too Dumb to Live: A two-parter; Danny becomes very unpopular for not realizing that joking around about a life-or-death situation is probably not an ideal course of action. Then Ben gets a reality check that being a dick for no reason during said-situation has consequences. Lethal ones,
in poor Danny’s case. Ben, at least, gets better after his mistake. - Took a Level in Badass: Zoey begins the movie very shy and timid, but becomes much bolder as the movie goes on, even successfully hatching a plan to trick the game-master into thinking she's dead so she can steal a gun from the cleanup crew.
- Took a Level in Kindness: Ben is initially abrasive, and unintentionally contributes to Danny's death when he refuses to hand over a lighter and Danny falls through the ice trying to retrieve it. However, Ben gradually becomes nicer as the movie goes on, and he even tells off Jason for his comparatively more callous attitude towards them all dying one-by-one.
- Trailers Always Spoil: Only a minor example, but the trailer for this movie shows in advance that the first escape room locks everyone inside and turns up the heat to levels that will be fatal if they don't get out, and it shows in advance that the entire party escapes this particular room alive (though the trailer didn't show specific details like the exact solution, which involves pressing down coasters to open the escape route, nor did the trailer show that the chandelier is also fatal and will blast fire into the room if they're too slow). Also, the trailer showed in advance that one of the escape rooms is icy cold, but didn't show in advance that Danny dies in this room.
- Unreliable Narrator: Jason lies regarding the exact details of his near-death experience on the boat, which is reflected by the flashback having a key discrepancy in who is wearing the coat.
- Vasquez Always Dies: Two female characters. One's a scarred Iraqi war vet, the other's a quiet nerd in a sweater. Guess which drops down an escape room. Hint: The quiet girl has her face on the movie poster.
- The Walls Are Closing In: In the final room, Ben is forced to unlock a door before the walls of a library crush him to death. When this scene is shown at the beginning of the movie, the code apparently doesn't work, and it looks like Ben will be killed—but when the movie plays this scene again in its proper chronological order as the final room, it turns out the code did work, it just unlocked the fireplace instead of the door. The fireplace is the real escape route; Ben is able to escape the crushing wall by crawling into the fireplace.
- Warmup Boss: The very first escape room is both a literal and figurative example; everyone is locked in a room with the heat constantly being turned up, and they'll all be incinerated if they don't escape. However, the solution to this room is comparatively easy compared to the puzzles later on, the group just has to keep coasters pressed down to keep the escape vent open. Also, as in the trailer, everyone manages to escape this room alive.
- Win to Exit: Naturally, this is how the escape rooms work. Except once you've made it through all of them.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- In the icy cold room, Ben tosses his lighter onto the ice instead of just giving it to Danny, and this indirectly results in Danny's death because Danny falls through a hole in the ice while trying to retrieve it. The rest of the party chews Ben out over this, and to his credit, Ben is torn up with guilt and admits he was just "being an asshole". Though then the party goes too far when they jump to the conclusion that Ben must be the game master.
- Ben gets a moment of this later on, as he calls out Jason for his cold attitude toward the other players, and especially for killing Mike and simply dismissing the death.
- The World's Expert (on Getting Killed): Danny, the escape room enthusiast who has completed countless other such puzzles previously, is the first to die.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Danny has the most experience with escape rooms so he can anticipate a lot of the gameplay. However, he keeps downplaying the actual danger that the players are put in, reasoning that the company behind the escape rooms would be sued into oblivion if somebody actually died. He's not aware that Minos is an Evil Corp that profits off their deaths. End result, Danny is the first person to die.
