FOLLOW ME

US, 2020, 93 minutes, Colour.

Keegan Allen, Holland Roden, Denzel Whitaker, Ronan Rubenstein, George Janko.

Directed by Will Wernick.

Follow Me has an alternate title, No Escape. The focus here is on an escape room and the attempts to get out of it. The writer-director also wrote the 2018 drama, Escape Room.

This is a film geared for 20 somethings (and under). Older audiences might find the characters initially very trying, somewhat narcissistic, caught up in the world of social media. The central character, more narcissistic than the others, has an online program, capturing himself on camera in increasingly difficult situations, including getting out of escape rooms. He has an enormous online following – hence the title.

He is offered a challenge to go to Moscow, a most difficult challenge, an escape room in an old prison. He and his followers go off to Moscow, some touches of tourism for those interested, but some time clubbing and behaving boorishly, brash Americans on tour. They find themselves tangling with some local gangsters, at gunpoint.

However, they all agree to go to the test, all on camera.

The tone of the film changes somewhat when they are in the escape room, the leader using his wits to try to free his friends who are set up in torture chambers. There is some tension in his having to free them with the clock ticking down. However, as anticipated, things go wrong and the expert becomes more and more desperate.

Everything seems real, there are thugs, torturers, guns, sudden deaths.

By the end, the protagonist has experienced his comeuppance, an extraordinary fall after pride, and then there is a revelation about what happened with audiences probably shaking their heads.

And the target audience who likes this kind of horror film has given it something of a thumbs down – but, their comments sound like pouting, not satisfied with an entertainment and their felt need to go beyond, always going beyond, the demanding audience, never quite satisfied.