There’s something comforting about how straightforward a good escape room movie is. Be it the pinnacle of genre, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s gourmet iteration, The Platform, which I’m 90 percent sure “inspired” Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef, or the brief wink Thunderbolts* was one in its first act before reverting back to doing what Marvel does best, it’s a premise I can’t get enough of regardless of whether it’s about a bigger topic or just entertaining.
Of all the escape room movies I’ve watched, no film has been as esoteric as Hitoshi Matsumoto’s 2009 film, Symbol. Symbol, starring Matsumoto as The Man, is a movie about a man who wakes up in an empty room with nothing but buttons on the walls that he must press to get what he wants: out. We’re as lost, if not more, than The Man is in his circumstances. For all we know, he’s woken up barefoot, donned polka-dot pajamas, rocking a bob that’d make Anderson .Paak jealous, and he’s sequestered in a room that’s giving that one time Squidward visited the future in SpongeBob SquarePants. And those buttons I mentioned earlier, they’re actually the dingalings of countless and occasionally sentient cherub statues poking out from the white room’swalls. By booping their knobs, an infinitesimal amount of random objects are airdropped into the room with The Man. These items range from dreadfully pedantic to random as hell to vital in him figuring out his escape, so long as he remembers what each pecker summons. They can also be the room fucking with him to press a button summoning a giant ass from the sky to fart his entire body into a Yamcha-sized crater, giving him soy sauce after he’d already raw-dogged an entire helping of sushi, or dangling ways out just to Rube Goldberg its way into adding more obstacles for him to overcome. In essence, the mysterious white room in Symbol’s abject purpose is to torture The Man in the most Sisyphean Wile E. Coyote manner imaginable. © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion © Shochiku/Phantom Film/AOI Promotion For a tight 90 minutes, I witnessed The Man perpetually going through it in ways I’d like to imagine Old Boy‘s Oh Dae-su lost his mind, imprisoned in that apartment complex for years. While the latter’s mania occurred through a time-saving montage, I got to see The Man come completely undone in the liminal space of his escape-room prison in real time.
