No Escape / Follow Me (2020): Like, Subscribe, and Please Stop Killing My Friends

There are influencers who will eat terrible food for views.

There are influencers who will jump out of airplanes.

Cole Turner celebrates ten years of turning his life into content by flying to Moscow for an escape room specifically designed to terrify him.

That already sounds like a questionable anniversary gift.

Then his friends start dying.

The good news is that almost none of it is real.

The bad news is that Cole does not find that out until after he kills the one person who actually dies.

Happy ten years.

Escape Real Life, Preferably in First Class

Cole has spent a decade building his online channel, Escape Real Life, around travel, pranks, challenges, and whatever else keeps millions of people watching. His viewers have already convinced him to do things like get buried alive, so when they vote for Moscow as his next destination, he goes.

The difference between Cole the person and Cole the content machine is obvious almost immediately. Alone, he is calm. The second the phone comes up, his entire personality changes. Volume increases. Energy rises. Everything becomes material.

Talon and Dan both noticed the switch, and it becomes important because Cole’s friends are not always sure which version they are dealing with either.

He flies to Russia with his girlfriend Erin; his longtime friend Thomas; Dash; and Sam. Dash has arranged the trip through Alexei, a wealthy Russian fan who promises restaurants, clubs, and an escape room unlike anything Cole has done before.

Cole is initially underwhelmed.

Flying across the world for an escape room does sound a little like traveling to Paris for miniature golf.

Then Dash explains that the experience has been designed specifically for them.

That gets Cole’s attention.

Russia begins working on him before he ever reaches the escape room. Dash gets hauled away by police after riding the airport baggage conveyor belt into an employee-only area. Alexei arrives, flashes some paperwork, and has him released almost immediately.

Later, at a club, two men harass Erin and Sam. Cole intervenes, Alexei pulls a knife, one of the men pulls a gun, and Alexei’s security removes them.

Cole’s first concern afterward is whether the confrontation was captured on camera.

Erin is understandably unimpressed.

Nothing says supportive boyfriend quite like, “Are you okay, and more importantly, did we get that?”

That tension follows Cole back to the hotel. Erin makes it clear that she wants the version of him who exists when the phone is down, not the guy who automatically turns every frightening moment into something for strangers to watch.

Cole does care about Erin and his friends. He has just spent so long converting life into content that his first instinct is often to frame the moment before he actually experiences it.

For an attraction designed to manipulate his reality, that is a useful weakness.

The Most Romantic Date in Moscow Is Apparently Surveillance

The next day, Cole and Erin spend some time alone sightseeing.

Before they set off, the driver gives Cole some rubles and makes sure he notices a strange red card tucked inside. It looks important, but nobody knows why yet.

For once, Cole leaves the audience behind.

Erin gives him grief for not telling his followers where he is, which Talon found especially funny because the night before she was angry that he cared too much about the livestream.

Pick a lane.

They eventually end up at a restaurant where Cole discovers Alexei has somehow located them, paid their bill, and sent a car.

Cool or creepy?

Yes.

That evening Alexei takes the group to an old prison-like building for the main event.

He makes one thing very clear before they begin: no matter how real everything looks, they are safe.

This is exactly what you want to hear before strangers put bags over your head and lead you into separate rooms.

Cole’s phone is connected to the building’s camera system so the entire experience can stream live. Alexei explains that the setting is a former Bolshevik prison where enemies of the state were tortured and executed.

Then Cole gets locked in a cell with what looks very much like an actual corpse.

A large X marks the body’s stomach.

There is also a scalpel.

Subtle.

Cole eventually realizes the key to his cell is inside the body. He cuts it open, digs through the organs, finds the key, and escapes into a corridor where all four of his friends are waiting inside increasingly unpleasant traps.

At this point No Escape starts mixing Saw, Hostel, and an escape-room movie into one grim cocktail.

Dan liked the combination.

Talon mostly wanted to know why donating your body to science apparently risks ending with somebody digging a door key out of your intestines for entertainment.

Read the paperwork carefully.

One Hour, Four Traps, Surprisingly Few Actual Puzzles

Thomas is strapped to a stretching rack.

Dash is inside an Iron Maiden with a spike inching toward his eye.

Sam is strapped to a chair that shocks her whenever Cole and Thomas hit the sides of a metal maze.

Erin is locked inside a glass tank slowly filling with water.

Cole works through each puzzle while Alexei’s voice reminds them that the timer is running.

The machinery feels much more dangerous than Cole expected, but he keeps treating it like a game until the consequences become difficult to ignore. Thomas feels his body being pulled apart. Sam is genuinely screaming every time the maze shocks her. Erin ends up completely submerged.

Cole finally stops assuming there must be a safety mechanism waiting to save everyone.

He breaks the locks on Erin’s tank and drags her out after she has gone limp. She coughs up water and survives.

The timer expires.

Everybody is alive.

And Talon had a major complaint.

For an escape room, it was kind of boring.

Not the near drowning or electrocution. Those certainly add atmosphere.

But as somebody who has actually done escape rooms, Talon expected more searching, more clues, more interconnected puzzles, and generally more escaping. There are only a handful of major challenges.

Dan pointed out that they only had an hour.

Talon pointed out that normal escape rooms are also an hour.

She just usually leaves them without nearly being murdered.

Apparently she has been choosing the wrong escape rooms.

Sam’s puzzle does at least provide one of the better bits of dark comedy. The metal piece has to be guided through a maze without touching the sides, because every contact shocks her. It is basically the children’s game Operation, except instead of a buzzer, your friend gets electrocuted.

Dash even starts deliberately tapping the edges until everyone tells him to knock it off.

If your escape-room partner is using your nervous system to test whether the puzzle really works, you are allowed to reconsider the friendship.

Congratulations, You Escaped. Please Report to Your Kidnapping.

The group expects the game to be over.

It is not.

They use Erin’s key to enter the control room and find it wrecked and covered in blood. The door locks behind them.

Cole smashes his way out while everyone else protests that opening the door might be dangerous.

Fair.

But staying indefinitely inside a tiny bloody room with no food, bathroom, phones, identification, or obvious rescue plan is also not particularly strong survival strategy.

Eventually everyone follows him.

Outside they find Alexei’s security men apparently dead and several armed Russians waiting for them.

One of the men from the club holds a gun to Viktoria’s head and shoots her.

The group is kidnapped.

Cole wakes strapped to a chair while a Russian named Andrei explains that his own online audience has much more selective tastes than Cole’s.

Apparently Cole’s followers enjoy travel videos.

Andrei’s enjoy dismemberment.

Different demographics.

Andrei even offers a brief educational aside about how much blood comes out of a human head.

Dan appreciated the commitment to lifelong learning.

Talon agreed.

Knowledge is key.

Cole is locked in another room with a monitor and forced to watch Sam get a tooth pulled before her throat is cut. The process is surprisingly efficient considering the killers supposedly enjoy torture.

Talon expected fingernails, teeth, prolonged suffering, the whole nightmare buffet.

Instead, the murder portion of the evening moves along so quickly that Dan joked Sam must have used a safe word.

Pineapple will not save you here.

Stealth Mode Has Been Removed From Cole’s Settings

Cole manages to break his restraints and climb into the building’s ventilation system.

This should be where he becomes quiet.

It is not.

He crawls through the ducts with the subtlety of someone moving a washing machine down a staircase.

Elbows slam.

Knees bang.

Metal rattles.

Talon spent the sequence wondering how the killers had failed to locate him based entirely on acoustics.

The notoriously loud zipper from April Fool’s Day was apparently stealthier.

Through a grate, Cole watches Dash being tortured with a saw. The attacker’s body blocks much of what Cole can actually see.

That is also where both Talon and Dan began figuring out the movie’s trick.

Dan had already seen No Escape once before, but remembered noticing on his first viewing that the camera kept conveniently hiding the most important parts of the violence. Talon caught on when the masked men searching for Cole repeatedly moved together around obstacles instead of splitting up and trapping him from both sides.

They did not behave like competent people trying to catch him.

They behaved like performers giving him a chance to escape.

Cole does not notice.

He eventually finds the red door matching the card he was given earlier and meets the driver, who claims he has secretly been trying to help him. The driver tells Cole to leave while he still can.

Cole almost does.

Then he chooses his friends.

He goes back inside, finds Thomas battered but alive, and tries to escape with him.

Their reunion does not last.

A guard attacks, and Thomas goes down an elevator shaft.

Cole gets the full grief sampler.

Shock.

Anger.

Sadness.

Bargaining.

Talon dubbed it Grief’s Greatest Hits, available from Time Life for only three easy payments.

The Worst Surprise Party in Human History

Cole eventually discovers Alexei apparently working with the men behind the killings.

By now every friendly face in Moscow looks compromised.

He then finds Erin being held by Andrei.

Cole gets a gun but only manages to grab one bullet. He shoots Andrei in the shoulder.

Andrei responds by shooting Erin in the head.

For Cole, that is the last piece.

His friends are dead.

His girlfriend is dead.

Alexei betrayed him.

Everything that began as content has become real.

Cole is thrown into another room, finds one more passage out, and emerges into a dark space where Alexei is waiting with Cole’s phone.

Alexei starts filming him.

Cole attacks.

Dan compared the beating to Ralphie finally snapping on Scut Farkus in A Christmas Story, except this version keeps going until Alexei’s face is destroyed.

Alexei tries to stop him.

Cole does not stop.

Then the lights come on.

Everyone walks out.

Erin is alive.

Thomas is alive.

Sam is alive.

Dash still has all his limbs.

Viktoria was never shot.

The kidnappers are actors.

The club confrontation, the driver, the torture rooms, the deaths, the entire nightmare after Cole arrived in Russia were pieces of one enormous stunt organized by Alexei and Cole’s friends for the tenth anniversary of Escape Real Life.

The end credits show how carefully the whole thing was built. Makeup created the injuries. Hidden equipment kept Erin breathing inside the tank. Thomas landed safely after the elevator-shaft fall. Actors were planted throughout Moscow. Even people Cole believed were random strangers were part of it.

There is only one problem.

Alexei really is dead.

And absolutely nobody in the giant room full of people thought to intervene when the traumatized man they had spent hours convincing was fighting for his life started beating their friend to death.

That may be the movie’s least believable puzzle.

Cole’s livestream is still running through all of this. His followers watch the reveal in real time, and their reactions are about as useful as internet reactions usually are. Some are horrified. Some insist it must still be fake. Others seem impressed that Cole actually killed Alexei.

That gives the movie one last ugly joke about the world Cole built. He trained an audience to expect escalation, and even with a real body on the floor, part of the crowd is still processing it as content.

The Verdict

Talon gives No Escape / Follow Me 5.5 cents out of 10.

She did not hate it. She found it enjoyable, easy to watch, and close to the kind of survival-adventure structure she already likes in disaster movies. Once Cole believes the escape room is over and realizes he is still trapped in something much larger, the movie becomes more interesting.

That extended-game concept was actually Talon’s favorite part. The idea of an escape room secretly continuing after the players believe they have completed it could be genuinely fantastic if somebody ever built one without the fake executions and accidental homicide.

Her bigger issue is that much of the movie simply feels average. It is competently made, but for long stretches there was not much she wanted to yell at the screen about. It lacks the constant stupidity, bizarre decisions, or ridiculous horror logic that usually gives her more to chew on.

Dan is considerably more generous at 7 cents out of 10.

For him, the fact that there was less obvious nonsense worked in the movie’s favor. He thought it was fairly well crafted and especially liked how comfortably it combines several familiar influences. There is Saw in the traps, Hostel in the foreign nightmare, escape-room horror in the puzzles, and even a little April Fool’s Day in the final reveal.

None of those ingredients is particularly new.

But Dan thought they fit together.

Both hosts also figured out the twist before Cole did, largely because the movie starts hiding too much of the supposed violence and because the people hunting him occasionally seem suspiciously bad at their jobs.

Still, the final turn works because figuring out that everyone is alive does not answer the more important question:

What happens when Cole finds out?

Unfortunately for Alexei, the answer is murder.

So No Escape ultimately delivers the most dangerous influencer lesson of all.

If you spend ten years telling somebody to do absolutely anything for the content, eventually you may create a situation where he does.