Escape Room: Adam Robitel’s thriller deals out death to those who can’t solve riddles in time

Entertainment fads don’t tend to inspire the best movies. But those who’ve jumped on the escape room trend (and those of us who remain merely curious) have lucked out with Adam Robitel’s Escape Room, a cutthroat little thriller that’s surely more fun than most of the riddle-solving lock-ins currently springing up around the country.

(Bonus: It won’t make team-building co-workers want to kill each other!) Conspicuously short on gore, it’s geared toward those who prefer the thrill of impending death to seeing the actual event. Though its final beats have an awfully familiar flavour, this is one time a fright-flick’s inevitable promise to return doesn’t inspire groans. We begin in an elegant, wood-panelled study, where a desperate-sounding young man suddenly crashes through the ceiling and starts searching for an exit.

He limps all around, frantically looking for hints to the combination of a puzzle-like lock on the door, but one wall of the room decides to go all Death Star trash-compactor on him. He’s being crushed to death when the movie discreetly cuts away. Leaping back three days, we meet a brilliant but shy young math/physics student, Zoey (Taylor Russell), who’s staying on campus alone over Thanksgiving.

She’d planned on some quality time with unsolved equations, but a professor nudges her out of the dorm: He mails her an elegant little puzzle box — the same one we’re seeing other characters solve elsewhere — that contains an invitation to the mysterious Minos building.