Riddle Room – 2016 – A Puzzle Mystery
I was watching this movie – Riddle Room. I thought it was a very interesting title. It doesn’t say much about the contents of course. The main plot is this woman being held captive in a room. She is tormented by masked kidnappers. We know that there are clues inside the room on how to escape. We also know that there are Clues inside the room to whom the woman really is. She doesn’t know who she is. We don’t know who she is. But the perpetrators, the people holding her captive sure knows who she is and they want something from her. She doesn’t know what and they don’t tell her. Kinda interesting. Don’t you think?
It’s a little bit slow-paced for my taste though. But it’s also very interesting at the same time. I don’t know how many times some similar scenes were repeated, but I think there were repeated too many times. It got somewhat out of hand.
The perpetrators are masked. I really like the main perpetrators’ mask, my wife didn’t agree at all, she thought it was just silly. But for my taste is was fantastic. But on the other hand, I kind of like cheap-looking masks that are maybe not that frightening but supposed to be frightening for the characters in the movies. You can take for instance a clown mask. I know that some people are afraid of clowns., I’m not though. There’s even a phobia named after that which I cannot remember right now. I think it’s silly to be afraid of clowns, but a killer in a clown mask is a really good killer mask.
Of course, the mask used in Friday the 13th, the hockey mask, is of another level. That is frightening really really frightening. That doesn’t mean that that is my favorite mask in the Friday the 13th franchise though. I think that the best mask is the sack that Jason has over his head in the second film of the franchise. Oh well, never mind.
What’s interesting here is not maybe the masks or the people holding the woman captive. The interesting thing is why. I think that we get a pretty good answer to that once the movie is over. I don’t think that I should tell you. Because that will ruin the experience of the movie. It would be a major spoiler
I don’t know how many Escape Room movies there are out there. I like the concept of them. This is both kinds of an escape room film and it’s not. Because there is no intent for the woman to escape. That is not the purpose that she’s there for. She’s there for solving a mystery. And the mystery is given to her in the form of hints and riddles.
There are very few actors in the movie. There’s almost only this woman that we see full out. There are a few perpetrators. They are masked so it’s hard to say how good actors they are. And they are not all only masked by face. They are also masked by voice. They talk through a device that makes their voice sound very different. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good thing because it’s very hard to hear what they’re saying.
And I guess that this is also a thing that you should keep in mind when watching this kind of movie. I think that more or less you can tell how large budgets the film has by the sound. This sound is rather poor and that means that the movie itself didn’t have that much of a budget with mics and whatever needed to make a good soundtrack.
So, with that said, I think that I would have benefited from subtitles on this one because it’s very hard to hear what they’re talking about from time to time. Sometimes it’s okay and sometimes when you really concentrate you get the picture. Forget about eating chips while watching Riddle Room, it would be impossible to hear the dialog.
But I think that in the end, it was an interesting movie even it wasn’t necessarily a really good one. It was quite boring. But I think that the ending is good enough to forgive some of the downsides. But at the same time, it was very slow and it was repetitive. That is not something that I am really happy about and that will of course reflect on the rating I’m giving and you see the writing below of course. Don’t forget to make your own rating. You can click the graph below to select your own rating and it will show the average rating from all visitors.
