SPIRIT OF INDEPENDENCE 2020: EXIT

EXIT (2020)

Starring: Billy James Machin, Leonarda Sahani, Christophe Delesques, Charlotte Gould

Writer: Matthew Bayliss

Director: Michael Fausti

 
A double booking for a luxury apartment leads to two vastly different couples spending the night there. Steve (Machin) and Michelle (Sahani) are typically English. They're unadventurous, solid and like to be in their comfort zone. Steve likes lager. Michelle likes to please Steve. Neither of them likes horror. Christophe (Delesques) and Adrienne (Gould) are French. They're cosmopolitan and don't know what a comfort zone is. Christophe likes wine. Adrienne likes wine. Neither of them likes convention.

With two such contrasting partnerships and a whole evening ahead of them to eat, drink and get to know each other, everything's going to go swimmingly, right? Of course not. Christophe and Adrienne are already intent on a heavy session of drugs and debauchery and their new English acquaintances are coming along for the ride. And what the hell's going on with the apartment itself? What's going on in the attic can't have been mentioned in the brochure.

With its tale of steadfast Brits trying desperately not to be lured into the pits of depravity by louche foreigners, Exit's allegorical trappings in relation to the UK's departure from a certain overseas bloc are there to be drawn. From Steve in particular, there's an unwillingness to communicate with anyone he sees as different. Christophe's multilingual stylings, in particular, don't sit well with Steve - it's just some poncey French bloke showing off as far as he's concerned.

There's class conflict too, most of it confined to rumblings in the subtext save for one outburst that's far too on-the-nose, double underlining a point it doesn't need to. The plot doesn't go into any sort of detail about what the four do for a living but there's a certain clash of the practical versus the creative, the buttoned-down versus the bourgeois which almost never ends well. Suffice to say, I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that this is most definitely the case here.

Of course, if you've no time for all of that political nonsense then it's perfectly fine to approach this as a horror/thriller in which you can take bets on who's going to make it out of the place the following morning, if indeed any of them are. I would say there's an undercurrent of sexual tension too but there's nothing under about the current at all - from early on, those liberal French types are shown to be Anglophiles in every sense. 

Exit has its moments but an awful lot of the wind is taken out of those by the stylistic choices - visions, flashbacks, flash forwards and lots and lots (and lots) of slow motion. The potential queasiness and ferocity of the pivotal plot points is vastly reduced by having them play out at a crawl. Yes, there's tension to be wrung from playing out a pursuit at an agonising creep but having a fight run at the same pace just sucks all the thrills from it.

Elsewhere, the subplot concerning the sinister reason for the existence of this particular apartment is left largely unexplained, which leaves room for the audience's imagination but doesn't make as much of an impact as it should. Having said that, the opening tour of the place, conducted by the excellent Tony Denham as Russell Bone, landlord from Hell (perhaps literally), is both amusing and worrying in equal measure. It's a bit of a shame he isn't in this more as he strikes just the right balance between funny and oddly frightening.

Even if the material doesn't quite stretch to cover the whole running time, it's encouraging that there's no obvious Exit route. Sahani, as the initially nondescript supporting character who suddenly and interestingly becomes the lead, deals capably with the various twists and turns. The vivid colours and trippy soundtrack give the proceedings a suitably discordant edge and although matters don't turn as spectacularly bloody as you may be expecting there are a couple of effectively nasty moments. 

Various parts of Exit don't click together as they ought to but it's fascinating to see how a parable for the here and now is told through the filter of a down and (sometimes) dirty horror/thriller and it deserves credit for that at the very least. I would much rather watch a movie that aims high and doesn't quite hit the target than one which plays it annoyingly safe.

The feeling I couldn't shake after seeing this is that a just a slight tightening of two or three sequences, plus a reduction in the deployment of the slow-mo, would have resulted in a 75-minute film that delivered on a more regular basis. As it is, despite its flaws, Exit is still worth the entrance fee.