Escape Room is a fun, trashy but ultimately gutless horror flick that deftly tunes into a booming trend

When future historians look back on the twenty-teens, perhaps on a nostalgia-fuelled talking head show called ‘I Love 2018’, they’ll remark on the popular trends that characterise our present day.

“Who remembers flossing?” the cadaver of Victoria Beckham will rasp, what remains of her body elegantly propped up in a Christian Dior gurney and kept alive by a series of Alibaba-sponsored intravenous biotubes. “Who remembers escape rooms?”

Escape rooms, games in which you are voluntarily locked inside a room with your friends and tasked with solving puzzles to escape, found an enthusiastic audience in London’s young professionals, who were already very familiar with spending too much money to live inside tiny boxes. Capitalising on the peaking fad is this Saw-esque horror lark, Escape Room, in which six contestants attempt to win $10,000 after being invited to take part in a mysterious new escape room experience, which promises to be the most immersive yet.

The twist? The rooms are rigged to murder them in a series of violent and inventive ways, each relating to a personal trauma suffered by the players. A war veteran who suffered burns in an IED blast has a bad time in a room that turns out to be an oven, for example. A hedge fund manager who almost froze to death in a boating accident freaks out in a room made of ice, naturally enough. Make no mistake, this movie is hot garbage from start to finish, a guilty thrill with the action of an episode of The Crystal Maze and the plotting of a Goosebumps book, loosely held together by a morbid curiosity of what each subsequent room will contain.

The gore is also hamstrung by a commercially friendly 15 rating keeping things tame and lame. Had Escape Room gone for the 18 rating, with blood and intestines flying every which way, it would have been far more appealing to the Twitch watching teen audience whose attention it so desperately craves.