No Exit – Movie Review

95 Minutes, Rated R

Written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari

Directed by Damien Power

**NOTE: this post will be updated with audio once we actually have the chance to talk about it. Until then, enjoy this brief look at my thoughts. Stay tuned.**

Synopsis:

Darby Thorne is a young woman En route to a family emergency who is stranded by a blizzard and forced to find shelter at a highway rest area with a group of strangers. When she stumbles across an abducted girl in a van in the parking lot, it sets her on a terrifying life-or-death struggle to discover who among them is the kidnapper.

“How far would go for a stranger?”

That’s the question confronting recovering addict Darby as she escapes from a rehab facility in California to try to drive across country to visit her dying mother in the hospital in Salt Lake City.

Stuck in a Forest Service visitors’ center during an impassable blizzard, she finds herself stuck with 4 strangers, and stumbles into a mystery that is both heartbreaking and terrifying: a small girl, bound and gagged, hidden inside a van during the blizzard.

With no phone or idea whose van it is, Darby must decide whether to try and save the child or simply keep her head down and survive the storm.

What follows is, effectively, a chamber piece, wherein these 5 (+1) characters try to get to know one another, though each for various reasons.

Director Damien Power deftly encapsulates the spirit of the film in the characters playing the otherwise-innocuous card game called “bullshit,” where you must take what you know and try to determine who is lying.

Obvious? Sure. But a beautiful metaphor for Darby’s search for the kidnapper.

I had originally noted that the film told us who the villain was after only 30 minutes but was shortly thereafter reminded that I didn’t write the script with an “Oh…” moment.

Silly me.

Sure, in a movie like this, people are bound to make stupid decisions, but overall, Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari’s script keeps those to a minimum (though honestly, you can’t have a story like this without some bad choices, am I right?).

The performances are pretty good across the board, with Havana Rose Liu doing a fine job in what was only her second film at the time (she previously starred in Mayday [review HERE] and has since also featured in The Sky Is Everywhere [review HERE], though it released prior to No Exit). Dale Dickey is a constant, and Dennis Haysbert is, well… Dennis Haysbert.

David Rysdahl is suitably creepy and suspicious, and Danny Ramirez exhibits the charm he showed us during The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (also from Disney).

The contained setting makes cinematography a challenge, but even that feels right, given the circumstances.

Ultimately, No Exit doesn’t just give the audience a chance to figure out who’s guilty, but rather to ask the question “is anybody really innocent?”

No Exit is now streaming exclusively on Hulu in the US and on Disney+ Internationally (due to the film being rated R, it’s being release under the 20th Century Studios masthead. It’s a Disney thing).

No Exit stars Havana Rose Liu, Danny Ramirez, David Rysdahl, Dannis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, and Mila Harris.

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