I can't believe this movie has been so poorly marketed that I had to learn about it from my mother.
Everyone I've spoken to loves this movie but nobody seems to be talking about it so I set this up quick to get some thoughts down. Will likely be editing it as I go.
Despite what you might have expected, this movie is surprisingly good.
No Exit could be filed away for an unoriginal scenario--strangers forced together in isolation because of a storm; A chamber piece who-done-it reminiscent of the Old Dark House genre of horror but with the modern transient flair of a highway rest stop--but this film does a lot to play on your expectations. Over the course of 1 hour and 35 minutes you'll likely come to discover a quicker-paced, The Hateful Eight with
less pretentious sequences, and plot points that unfold more like a carefully thought out chess game than a cheap excuse for gore.
This movie will also ruin your expectations if they'd been set by the lame
plot synopsis, indie director, generic promotional material, a relatively unknown cast, and it having
been picked up in post-production to go straight-to-streaming.
What this movie does well, for a start--chamber films tend to let dialogue drive. Think Hateful Eight, or Boys in the Band, both very long beautiful movies, but they are long, very slow-slow burns. Meanwhile No Exit won't seem to let each new bit of information that Darby acquires settle down before we've snowballed into the next.The last movie to burn through its synopsis this quickly was Hereditary, and this movie beats it at only 18 minutes, and the rest is icing (or--maybe ice).
The writing also naturally flows toward one of the most badass scenes I've seen since the carving knife in Evil Dead remake but in a coke-fueled checkmate that had me saying, "I feel so much better" afterward. I'm going to be thinking about this movie for years. Brilliant.
No Exit has a disarmingly simple scenario but its characters are complex. In the transient setting of a highway rest stop that screams at you to leave through howling wind and snow pouring through an unsealed remodel off the back of the building, it isn't just the storm but the games that each character plays that make it so there is No Exit.
Despite marketing so horrible that my mother got to it before I did, for horror and mystery fans alike this movie is a must-see.
