‘Escape the Field’ yields bumper crop of gimmicks, little else
Escape the movie, I say. You wake up in a cornfield with no memory of how you got there. I sometimes wake up in a movie theater with no memory of what I just watched. But let’s not get into that.
In “Escape the Field,” each awakened person has been given something: a gun with a single bullet or a knife or a compass or matches. What “Escape the Field” could really have used was a script. This almost ridiculously gimmicky genre film from first-time feature filmmaker Emerson Moore begins with six strangers waking up in that cornfield. Cue “The Twilight Zone.” We wish. Rod Serling is nowhere to be found in this corn.
The six, whose names are not even introduced intelligently, if at all and who
have almost no back stories, are goatee-sporting Tyler (Theo Rossi), scrubsdressed blonde Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins), angry, tall, Afghanistan veteran Ryan (Shane West), nightie-clad Denise (Elena Juatco), British-accented coder Cameron (Tahirah Sharif) and private-school blazer-wearing Ethan (Julian Feder).
They are strangers to one another. But they have all ended up in the same, vast existential cornfield. Is it some sort of diabolical game?
Can we blame M. Night Shyamalan? The strangers band together, and for some reason they use the compass to head south. Sirens blare at intervals. The
items they have all have the same symbol on them, a sort of stamped trademark. They encounter what they think is a scarecrow. But it more closely resembles a department store mannequin. They amble around with as little purpose as the screenplay by Moore, Sean Wathen (“Apple”) and firsttimer Joshua Dobkin. The
dialogue is minimalist, perhaps thankfully.
An unseen figure violently drags away a man in a suit that the group encounters. The fact that Cameron has worked for the Pentagon spawns some QAnon type conspiracy theories.
“Something’s not right,” someone says. Yeah, it’s your movie, I respond. Thirsty, Ryan husks some corn only to find it all rotten. Fill in your own wisecrack here. How much you want to bet that the woman of color in the nightie is going to get it first?
Ryan goes all “Apocalypse Now.” But at least that tells you that Moore has seen one great film. Two of the members of the group enter a container-like labyrinth. Sam turns out to be as great at puzzles as she is at bandaging the wounded. We also get tiger pits, quicksand and a dart full of some drug. What we don’t get is any reason why we should care… or watch. I confess I have little patience for gimmick films. I tired of the corn.
The problem with “Escape the Field” is that because the characters are strangers to the viewers as well as to each other, we have little to no sympathy for them. Rossi has a few lines about his 7-yearold daughter, and you lap them up like you are dying of thirst. There is a clip tucked into the final credits that is even more meaningless than the film you just saw.
You can pretend to believe that you do not have to introduce and develop characters. But you do. Really.