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Released by: Lionsgate
Released on: June 21st, 2022.
Director: Emerson Moore
Cast: Shane West, Theo Rossie, Jordan Claire Robbins, Tahirah Sharif, Elan Juatco
Year: 2022
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Escape The Field – Movie Review:
Directed by Emerson Moore, who co-wrote with Sean Wathen and Joshua Dobkin, 2022's Escape The Field not surprisingly takes place... in a field. A corn field, to be specific. Here a woman named Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins), a nurse we can assume by her garb, wakes up, confused and unaware of where she is or how she got there. The first thing she finds nearby is a loaded pistol.
She soon comes face to face with a threatening man named Tyler (Theo Rossi), he's equally confused and has on his person some matches. The quickly team up to try and find their way back to civilization but before long run into a few others seemingly lost in the field and just as unaware of how they got there as our two leads. Each has their own tool – an army vet named Ryan (Shane West) has a lantern, a high school student named Ethan (Julian Feder) has a compass, a Pentagon employee named Denise (Elena Juatco) has a knife and a random bespectacled English woman named Cameron (Tahirah Sharif) has some water.
As the plot unfolds, the group begrudgingly cooperates to try and figure things out. As they uncover hints as to what might be really going on here, tension amongst the members of the group increases, only getting worse when someone or something starts killing them off as they try and escape.
Escape From The Field has some interesting ideas at play and couple of moments of solid tension but gets bogged down with a ‘seen this before’ second half and a drab backdrop. The VAST majority of this movie takes place with the characters surrounded by corn stalks, and honestly, that isn’t all that interesting to look at for eighty-eight minutes. The filmmakers try to keep us on the edge of our seats and do a reasonably good job of crafting some intriguing characters and alliances as the story plays out, but it ultimately feels way too much like Escape Room for its own good.
Performances are find. Jordan Claire Robbins’ character takes a while to turn into anything but she gets there and when she does, her acting is good – we like her and want her to get out of this situation unharmed. The rest of the characters lack much personality and while the actors that portray them are decent enough (it’s fun to watch Shane West do some pretty serious scenery chewing here) they can only do so much with the material and some of the dialogue just doesn’t really work. Whenever the script allows their characters to explain the background details we need to understand them, it feels forced and brings things to a crawl just when the tension should be ramping up.
Escape The Field – Blu-ray Review:
Escape The Field arrives on Region A Blu-ray from Lionsgate in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer framed at 2.39.1 widescreen taking up 20.5GBs of space on the 25GB disc. Picture quality here is very strong. Shot digitally, the image shows no damage, dirt or debris but does have noticeably more texture than typical digitally shot films tend to show. It results in a very nice looking picture with good depth and detail. Colors are reproduced accurately and black levels are strong. There are no problems with any compression artifacts. There is some very minor banding in a few spots but otherwise, it’s tough to complain about the picture quality here, it looks very good.
The 24-bit English language DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix on this disc is excellent. This isn’t a film packed with super immersive set pieces but the rear channels are used effectively, and sometimes very subtly, to pull you in. The party sequence and the bar sequence both stand out in this regard, with background chatter and effects putting you in the moment. Optional subtitles are offered in English, English SDH and Spanish.
The main extra on the disc is a commentary track with producer/writer/director Emerson Moore and writers Joshua Dobkin and Sean Wathen. They do a good job of going over the details of the making of the film, the writing process, who did what behind the camera, casting the film and working with the actors and more.
Additionally, the disc includes a twenty-four minute featurette called Pieces Of The Puzzle: The Making Of Escape The Field. This is worth your time as it’s quite interesting. A mix of interviews with the cast and crew as well as pertinent behind the scenes footage this featurette does a good job of showing what it was like on set, exploring the characters from the film and detailing its origins and what inspired it in the first place.
Outside of that, we get menus and chapter selection options. This release also comes packaged with a slipcover and an insert card that contains a download code for a digital HD version of the movie.
Escape The Field - The Final Word:
Escape The Field always feels somewhat restrained, and that, combined with the pedestrian script and too familiar concepts at play hurt what could and should have been an interesting thriller. That said, Lionsgate’s Blu-ray release looks and sounds excellent and the commentary and featurette will definitely appeal to those who may have enjoyed the movie enough to want to pick it up.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Escape The Field Blu-ray screen caps!
