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No Exit movie

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Paul Asay

Movie Review

She had a good reason to leave. Really.

It’s not as if it was the first time Darby had ditched rehab. She’d been in and out of clinics for years now. They didn’t work. They never worked. She didn’t think this one would be any different.

But still, Darby was willing to give it a chance. One big last fat chance.

But then, during yet another interminable and pointless group session, she gets a call: Her mother’s in the hospital. Brain aneurism, they said. She might die.

Darby had to see her.

Never mind that her sister told Darby not to come to Salt Lake—that no one even wanted her there. No matter that the clinic told her she had to stay put. No matter that she didn’t have a car, or even bus fare. Darby needed to see her mom. It might be the last time.

She bolts through the alarm-rigged doors, hotwires a clinician’s car and speeds away toward the Sierra Nevadas—the mountains she’ll need to cross to reach Salt Lake City.

But while Darby might’ve outfoxed the clinic, there’s no way around the weather. She heads straight into a howling blizzard which closes down the road.

“No one’s getting through until the storm passes,” a police officer tells her. She can either turn around and head back down the pass—back to wherever she came from—or she can spend the night in a visitor’s center a few hundred yards ahead.

Darby picks the visitor’s center, where a few other stranded souls are staying: Ed and Sandi, a husband and wife who’d been on their way to Reno. Handsome Ash, asleep on a bench. And a strange, nervous man named Lars, who says he’s headed back home to Battle Mountain.

But when Darby heads outside to see if she can get a few bars on her phone, she hears something—a bang, a muffled scream—and she sees that there’s a sixth person at the center: A little girl in the back of a van, hands tied, mouth taped shut.

Darby doesn’t know who owns the van: It could be any of the four people inside.

No bars on the phone means no 911, no one to call. If that little girl’s going to be rescued, Darby will have to do it—with help, if she can find someone to trust.

Darby had a good reason to leave. Now she has a good reason to stay—stay just long enough to rescue that little girl. And to do that, she’ll need to stay alive.

Positive Elements

Darby’s clearly No Exit’s hero. She’s determined to save the girl, even if it means risking both life and limb. (We also see a glimmer of hope that she just might shake free of her drug addiction, too.)

The other “guests” in the visitor’s center land on a broader spectrum—from being willing to help, to being willing to kill everyone there. The best of the bunch—we won’t say who—is an ex-Marine who does what he can to help Darby. And when a bad guy says that it’s stupid to risk your own life for a total stranger, he says, “I’m a Marine, idiot. It’s what we do.”

The police officer also seems like a kindly sort—though the goings on at that visitor’s center get a bit too serious for one cop to deal with on his own.

Spiritual Elements

When a traveler thanks the Marine for his service, Sandi replies that those sorts of clichés mean just about as much as “thoughts and prayers.” (Later, the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is used with bitter irony.) Someone sardonically shouts “hallelujah.” In a flashback, we hear someone beg God for help.

Sexual Content

Darby settles on one prime suspect and takes another traveler in her confidence. When the suspect walks in on the two of them discussing rescue options for the girl, Darby smooches the traveler (to make it look as though the two of them wanted to be alone for other reasons). Later, the man and Darby play-act again.

We learn that the kidnapped girl—Jay—is meant to be trafficked.

Violent Content

I’ll be non-specific here to avoid spoilers, which’ll make this section shorter than it probably should be.

Several people are shot—sometimes with traditional guns, other times with nail guns. Most die, though not always right away. One guy suffers a nail wound in his forehead: It’s not lethal, but when he slips in a pool of (someone else’s) blood, he falls and his forehead smacks the floor—sending the nail strait into his cerebrum. (He dies, of course.)

Another person gets nailed, by the wrist, to a wall. We see the victim try to escape from the nail in a handful of painful, bloody ways. Jay, the little girl, is threatened with the nail gun in the same way. A victim is shot several times with the nail gun until the body is completely lifeless. Someone’s stabbed in the throat with a screwdriver. Characters get into less weapon-y fights, too, and someone is nearly choked to death. At least one person runs into the storm, only to tumble down a hill. Those who go outside face threat of death by hypothermia.

Duct tape gets ripped off Jay’s face, which clearly hurts. Jay also suffers from Addison’s disease—a condition where excess adrenaline can kill: The kidnapping and time at the visitor’s center are obviously not good for her, and she nearly dies from the combined ordeal.

A man asks the Marine if he ever killed anyone in action. “I lost count,” the Marine deadpans. A car crashes. A building gets set on fire and burns spectacularly. In flashback, we see Darby, unconscious, in a car as her family hammers on the car window to get her out. High-strung Lars mutters, after a card game, that he should really kill someone who made fun of him.

We learn that Darby’s father committed suicide. A villain taunts her with that knowledge—repeatedly asking her just how he died and insinuating that she’ll die in the same way.

Crude or Profane Language

The f-word is used more than 25 times, and the s-word nearly 35 times. We also hear “d–n,” “h—” and “p-ssed.” God’s name is misused a half-dozen times, most of those with the word “d–n.” Jesus’ name is also abused six times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Jay is given a drug to keep her disease at bay. In flashback, we learn that someone was blackmailed for smoking marijuana.

As mentioned, Darby is a drug addict: She confesses to Ash that she’d take just about every drug she could get her hands on. At the clinic, she mentions that she’s been clean for 11 days, and she listens without enthusiasm as another patient details her struggles with drug use. (Darby snipes that she heard that same patient tell the same story two years ago at another drug recovery clinic.) And when she discovers a drug stash in the clinician’s car, she considers taking it before reaching the visitor’s center.

[Spoiler Warning] Darby eventually does consume the drug: She uses it to numb the pain (which she knows’ll be horrific) as she plots a situational escape.

Other Negative Elements

Ed is an enthusiastic gambler. As the travelers settle in to play a card game (named after a popular, profane exclamation), he tells the players, “the trick is to play the man, not the hand.” He says he likes Reno because it has “all the action of Vegas, [but] half the noise.”

As mentioned, Darby steals a car, and she probably swipes a phone, too. A few travelers have secrets, and they lie to keep them hidden.

Conclusion

No Exit, which is being released on Hulu, is a simple story with simple stakes: A handful of travelers discover that one (or more) of them is a child trafficker and potential killer. And it’s not just the kidnapped girl’s life that’s at stake: It’s pretty much everyone’s.

So let’s make this conclusion simple, too.

No Exit is quite bloody and sometimes sadistic. While certainly blood and death is to be expected in R-rated thrillers, this movie sometimes crosses the line from dramatizing tense, threatening situations and into becoming something more akin to torture. Bodies pile up as the snow comes down.

And even if you shut your eyes throughout the whole thing, your ears would still be exposed to plenty of profanities. The movie’s obligatory semi-happy ending doesn’t ameliorate all the badness that came before. And the fact that ingesting an illegal drug saves the day? Well, that seems like a mixed message.

Whenever a nail gun becomes part of a movie’s supporting cast, you know you’re in for trouble.

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Paul Asay

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.