Escape the Field (2022)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) Oh, such wasted potential. I don’t mind movies built on big mysteries—set up a good solid hook and I’ll follow. But I have one condition, and it’s that I’m given a substantial answer to the mystery at some point… otherwise I’m liable to think that the writers were too cowardly to come up with a conclusion. While the setup of Escape the Field isn’t all that startlingly original in putting its characters in the middle of an apparently infinite cornfield (see 2019’s In the Tall Grass for more), the mystery is enough to get us through a few rough early patches—whether it’s incredibly annoying characters (too bad for Tahirah Sharif, stuck in a bad role), an inconsistent tone and a development that somehow borrows from escape rooms. Our six characters bicker a lot, and as the film advances, it becomes clear that they’re not only stuck in a supernaturally large field or an enigmatic puzzle, but also in a slasher horror movie. By the time the slasher thing becomes central to the plot and some military mumbo-jumbo is dropped into the third act, the mystery becomes exasperating—and that’s well before the film ends on some incredibly tired “GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT!! HA-HA-HA!” clichés. The problem is not just that Escape the Field can’t manage even a mildly satisfying ending—it’s that the entire film promises something that it ultimately can’t deliver. Bad writing set up the film for failure, which is too bad considering that writer-director Emerson Moore does much better on the directing front, wringing much out of the limited landscapes of an endless corn field—or, more specifically, what does not fit in such a setting. But in the end, direction can’t compensate for a hollow narrative, or rather an incomplete narrative without much else in the way of characters, dialogue or narrative rhythm. Don’t le the intriguing premise seduce you—there’s nothing to see in Escape the Field.