No Exit – Film Review

In No Exit, Havana Rose Liu makes her feature film leading role debut as Darby, 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.

It’s clear that director Damien Power is extremely talented at what he does and he’s certainly someone with a lot of bold ideas, even if his new film No Exit suffers from being a little too slow and predictable at times. A lot of this movie reminded me of if The Hateful Eight were made by a less experienced director who wanted to turn it into a strange invasion-style movie instead.

The movie relies heavily on suspense and so it’s a really good thing that the suspense aspect of the film is genuinely interesting and enjoyable. Although the film takes far too long to get to the point (seriously, it’s not until the thirty to the thirty-five-minute mark until the actual plotline kicks in), once things get going, it’s hard to be legitimately bored by what’s happening on-screen.

No Exit seemed as if it was going to allow the audience to guess who the kidnapper was, but sadly, that’s not the case. We find out extremely fast who the culprit is, and although the film does throw in one smart twist shortly after, it was still disappointing to see that the film had zero interest in creating an entertaining mystery for its viewers to put together.

It would be like if in Knives Out we found out who murdered Harlan Thrombey in the first act, while the second two acts just served as action set-piece sequences. I’m so glad that didn’t happen in that movie but sadly, it happened here in No Exit. Not to mention the fact that the final thirty minutes are incredibly trope-filled.

But all of the performances here are truly terrific, especially from Havana Rose Liu who makes her feature film debut. Here’s hoping that she will get tons of huge projects down the road because her performance here as Darby is seriously stunning. She pulls off every emotion the script asks her to convey and she makes it look so easy. Watching her performance here, you’d swear you’re watching a veteran actor, but surprisingly, that’s not the case.

Danny Ramirez is also fantastic as Ash, as well as Dale Dickey who delivers an ominous and mysterious performance as Sandie. So much of this movie was quite good, but at the same time, so much of it was disappointing. And, as mentioned earlier, the third act really falls apart. Is No Exit an awful movie? Absolutely not. Is it a good movie? Not quite. But for those who enjoy these kinds of movies, you might want to give this a watch, especially if you want to see Liu show her star power.