No Exit is the sort of thriller I am drawn to. Disparate strangers trapped in a single location, a revelation that something bad is happening and someone is a killer, a battle of wills for survival. It's great popcorn entertainment. But No Exit doesn't quite make it all work, often riddled with weaknesses in the story telling. It ends up not being terrible, I enjoyed it enough to finish it, but I kept wishing it would be better at what it was doing.
No Exit doesn't handle it's "twists" very well, telescoping them fairly early, perhaps revealing them to early, and not really being able to make them surprising enough. It doesn't spend enough time on the characters to make them rounded enough. It's a Coles Notes version of The Hateful Eight missing out on most of what made that film so compelling. Then its third act falls into a fairly cliched pattern that feels like exactly what we would expect.
Still, the premise and the performances are strong enough that I was invested enough to watch to the end and see how it played out. I do worry that maybe if it had just been a worse movie I wouldn't have minded the film's shortcomings as much.
No Exit
Starring: Havana Rose Liu, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl, Dennis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, Mila Harris, Benedict Wall
Director: Damien Power
Writers: Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari
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