As awards season gears up, it’s easy to overlook what’s currently premiering at the box office. But January gives Be Reel a chance to examine the often bizarre and flawed genre fare Hollywood throws at the wall, as well as some of the better movies that set the table. On this episode, we search for a way through the newly released “Escape Room” and discuss two of its thrilling enclosed-space predecessors in 2002’s “Panic Room” and the 1954 classic “Rear Window.”
READ MORE: ‘Escape Room’ Is A Fun, Well-Crafted Thriller That Can’t Escape Ridiculous Franchise Ambitions [Review]
While these three films may seem disparate in their quality (press “play” below to find out for sure), there’s more in common between topflight Alfred Hitchcock and the modest PG-13 hit that is “Escape Room” than one might imagine. Both are deeply concerned with voyeurism and the assumptions we make about characters when they think no one is looking. “Escape Room,” which finds its inspiration in the recreational and corporate team-building trend, brings strangers into a funhouse that draws from their own traumas to test problem-solving skills.
But it’s not just the room standing between these characters and their freedom/reward. There’s also the unseen voyeur controlling their destiny. We know someone is watching in “Escape Room,” maybe not so different from L.B. Jefferies in “Rear Window.” From a seemingly safe distance, games master and Jimmy Stewart protagonist, alike, help inform the audience’s decisions about who has done enough to deserve or elude punishment. Then, in David Fincher’s “Panic Room,” the conceit is complicated even further: the room is both prison and weapon. The panic room holds the powers by which Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart can foil three home invaders. Trauma is at the center of this film, too, as it depicts a mother and daughter grieving the loss of their nuclear family.
They’re three quite different thrillers, but questions of “rear window ethics” are alive and well across the board. Listen below.