"No Exit" a lean, mean airport-paperback thriller

No Exit (2022)

The snowbound thriller “No Exit” is a lean and mean corker in the single-location, Agatha Christie-style tradition of a five-people-in-a-room whodunit. In this case, there’s a kidnapping afoot, and director Damien Power (who made his debut with 2017’s gimmicky but effectively unpleasant “Killing Ground”) keeps tightening the screws with some flair and does not go easy on his characters. As a tense, resourceful crowd-pleaser, "No Exit" isn't afraid to get vicious and then make its own exit after a swiftly sustained 95 minutes.

Darby Thorne (Havana Rose Liu) is already irritable, being in recovery at a Sacramento drug rehab center. When she gets an urgent call that her mother is in the hospital after a brain aneurism (and her sister doesn’t even want her there), Darby panics. She breaks out of the rehab center, steals a rehab employee’s car, and heads for Salt Lake City. A blizzard forces her to stop at a visitors’ center and wait out the storm. Inside where it’s warm, Darby is in the company of four strangers, including a married couple, war veteran Ed (the great Dennis Haysbert) and former nurse Sandi (the equally great Dale Dickey); the charismatic Ash (Danny Ramirez); and shifty loner Lars (David Rysdahl) with signs of volatility during a time-passing card game of "Bullshit” (how apt!). When Darby tries to get cell service outside and discovers a young girl (Mile Harris) being held captive in the back of a van, survival will depend on her staying calm and acting smart in figuring out which stranger is the kidnapper. 

Adapted from Taylor Adams’ 2017 novel by writers Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari (2021’s “Die in a Gunfight”), “No Exit” is a tight, cruelly effective thriller. It’s a little easy to clock who's done it pretty quickly, and yet, we remain invested to see how Darby will handle this perilous situation. So when the question, “What now?” is eventually answered after the early reveal, the film goes out of its way to be a less predictable mystery, and it may get carried away with one twist too many. Led by an engaging Havana Rose Liu, the cast of actors efficiently finds enough shading in their suspect characters, and director Power knows just how to up the lunacy with nail guns, freezing temperatures, and Chekhov’s Baggie of Coke. None of us are too good for an airport paperback of a movie, and “No Exit” does right by those parameters. 

Grade: B 

20th Century Studios released “No Exit” (95 min.) on Hulu on February 25, 2022.