The film begins with a man named Cole, a famous vlogger with millions of followers
on his channel called Escape Real Life. He makes vlogs about dangerous things his
subscribers challenge him to do, such as being buried alive and sneaking into a demon's sect.
Tens of thousands of people will tune in when he goes live, and to celebrate the tenth anniversary
of his channel, he's now on a flight to Russia with Erin his girlfriend, Samantha the pro skater,
his best friend Thomas, and Dash the reckless. The reason they’re flying over to Russia is
because Dash claims to have a wealthy friend named Alexei,
one of Cole's followers, who wants to take Cole to an escape room. At first, Cole laughs at the
plan and reminds them that they've been to escape rooms, but Dash says that this one is different,
and has been specifically made for them. Excited for this, Cole informs his followers
about the upcoming Russian escape room experience, which will be life streamed for everyone to see.
Once they arrive at the Russian airport, Dash literally goes inside the baggage claim conveyor
belt, and gets apprehended by airport security, who are just about ready to take him in their
custody. Fortunately, a guy appears and uses his wealth and influence to prevent this from
happening. The guy turns out to be Alexei, the very person who’s sponsoring them on this trip.
Right after, Alexei leads the group outside, and introduces them to his girlfriend Victoria.
They get taken to Alexei’s really fancy home, and start their night with a welcome toast,
before they head to an exclusive club and have the time of their lives there.
Feeling hyped up from the fun night, Cole goes live, until he gets interrupted by two nervous
fangirls. Being the fun and friendly internet persona he is, he starts vlogging with them, not
paying attention to the fact that his girlfriend Erin is getting harassed over at the bar.
It is not until Thomas scolds him that Cole finally does something.
Cole rushes to help Erin, but things only escalate quickly from this point on.
Even the wealthy Alexei looks intimidated because the two guys are part of the mafia. He pulls out
his knife to threaten one of the mobsters, but the other starts threatening them with a gun.
Luckily, a couple of security personnel arrive in time, and escort the men away.
On their way back to the hotel, instead of checking up on his girlfriend, Cole wonders
if any of that heroic act was caught on camera. This hurts Erin’s feelings, who later tells Cole
that she feels as if he cares about fame more than her. Cole spends the night pondering over this, so
to make things right, he decides to ask Erin out and spend some time together with her on the day
after. They get picked up by Alexei’s a sketchy driver, who initially refuses to let them get off
where they wanna go to, because apparently, Alexei ordered him to drop them off somewhere else.
However, when Cole simply insists on sightseeing first, the driver let's them tour on their own.
The driver sketchily hands him some folded up Russian cash since Cole doesn’t have any Russian
Rubel with him. We then get a romantic montage of them exploring the city, up until the two end up
at a restaurant. There is a strange red note tucked between the Rubel bills that falls on
the floor when Cole takes out the cash he’s been given to get ready to pay. Cole also notices that
they're being watched by the waiter. And to make things even weirder,
the waiter suddenly walks up to them and says that their meal is somehow paid for by Alexei,
and the driver is already waiting for them out front. Cole finds it odd that Alexei know
where they are, and the waiter gives Cole back the red note that he's dropped on the floor.
After leaving the place, Cole and Erin are sent back to the hotel,
where they join their friends to be driven to the exclusive escape room prepared for them.
Before they start, Alexei tells them to calm down because as real as everything might seem, they are actually fake.
Cole goes live for the last time before starting the game, promising his fans that everything
that happens inside the Escape Room would be streamed live through the security camera.
As the group stands around in the waiting room, two men with gas masks enter the room, along with
Alexei who poses as a translator, explaining to them the scenario of the Escape Room: which is
that they’re being held at the Boshevik prison, where enemies of the state are usually held,
tortured, and killed. The main mission is,
Cole must free his friends before the time runs out. They have a bag placed over their head,
and led to their starting position in the escape room. Cole is placed into a prison cell with a
dead naked Russian soldier.
Right after, the timer is started and Cole has one hour to act quickly.
He then goes to a locked door that leads to a room where his friends are held captive.
Seeing the X mark on the guy’s gut, Cole realizes he’s probably supposed to cut the guy open, so he
reaches for the knife provided and reaches inside, until he finds a key inside the man's stomach.
Using the key, he unlocks the door to the next room. The cell doors inside open right away,
while the one behind him closes. Here Cole finds each of his friends inside
a different cell, trapped in different torture devices. Erin inside a tank with a key in hand,
Samantha strapped to an electric chair, Thomas in some sort of a limb puller,
and Dash inside a spiked coffin. Suddenly, Alexei begins speaking
through a speaker installed, reminding him how much time he has left.
When Cole walks up to his two friends, Thomas points out how he feels like his limbs are
slowly getting pulled, while Dash says the coffin door is slowly starting to close.
Hearing this, Cole tries to solve the puzzle provided to free his friends.
At first, everyone seems chill, but every time Cole puts in a wrong piece,
the torture devices start pulling Thomas more, while Dash’s door starts closing faster,
eventually prompting everyone to panic.
Cole finally solves the first puzzle,
making all gears start turning like crazy, and Thomas is now in even more pain while
the spikes move closer and closer to Dash. Cole hurriedly starts working on the second puzzle,
and luckily solves it right before the spikes impale Dash, and Thomas’ limbs get ripped apart.
After freeing the two, now it’s time to free the girls. They walk up to Samantha,
who looks very uncomfortable, and begs to be let out of the chair. But Dash who still
thinks it’s a game only makes fun of her, while Cole & Thomas try to solve the next puzzle.
In this one, they have to move a piece through a circular maze without touching the sides:
every time the piece makes contact with the sides, Samantha gets electrocuted.
Dash who at first thinks it’s all fun and games, playfully touches the
side several times, until Thomas points out that he thinks Samantha is hurting for real.
Though still in disbelief, they start to take things seriously and move the piece
through the maze, until they get to the middle, meanwhile Samantha constantly gets electrocuted.
Samantha’s cell opens right after, and once they free her, she loses her shit and voices that she
doesn’t want to play the game anymore because it felt too real. Agreeing that this is too extreme,
they try speaking to Alexei to get him to stop the game, but don’t hear a reply.
Dash then admits that he doesn’t know Alexei that well, which angers Cole because they might have
been set up. With no time to argue, they rush to check on Erin inside the tank and witness
how water starts filling up inside.
Luckily, Thomas knows how to solve this next puzzle.
the goal is to have exactly 4 litres of water within a 3 litre and a 5 litre gallons.
After solving this, the cell opens, but the water keeps filling up,
so Cole and Thomas try to open it from the top, but it’s rusted shut.
While they panic,
water continues to fill up and Erin is starting to drown. In desperation, Cole begs Alexei to stop
the game and let Erin out, but still doesn’t hear a reply, meaning they are on their own.
He finally picks up a spare gear on the floor, and starts hitting the tank.
But after realizing it’s not going to break, he smashes the metal surface up top, while Erin
starts suffocating and loses consciousness. Despite the odds, they quickly pull her out.
Fortunately, Erin is still alive, meaning they’ve won this escape room. Eager to be done with this,
they use the key Erin is holding to unlock the door that leads back to the waiting room.
But to their horror, there is now fresh blood on the wall, and everything is in disarray. Not
only that, as it turns out, the timer is up, meaning the game should be over, and someone
should be here to pick them up. Here they realize that Alexei must be in trouble during the game,
and they realize the exit door is locked shut. Not wanting to be stuck here for much longer,
Cole breaks the lock,
and this is where the group witnesses the gruesome sight of the escape
room employees lying dead outside, and Alexei’s girlfriend Vanessa gets executed in front of them.
The shooter is one of the mobsters from the club, and he's not done with them yet. The
group gets taken inside a car, and it is revealed that the guy behind the wheel is Alexei’s driver.
On the next scene, Cole wakes up inside a torture chamber, confused and scared, until the other
mobster from the club whose name is Andrei walks in, and proceeds to point a gun to the side of
his head just to mess with him. As it turns out, Andrei is livestreaming to the deep web,
and explains that people pay big bucks to watch famous people like Cole and
his friends get tortured and killed in turns. But of course, the best is saved for last, so Cole
gets thrown into a cell, where he briefly watches Erin in another cell through a recording on a TV.
Cole hopelessly lies in his cell, until a few hours later the TV switches on again, showing
Samantha in the torture room, followed with Andrei taking a torture device and slitting her throat.
The devastating sight activates his fight or flight mode, so he begins hitting his rusty
chains against the metal bed until it breaks. At this moment, Cole suddenly remembers the red
note tucked inside his pocket and decides to study it, realizing that it contains
some sort of a code. Up next, he barricades the cell door and climbs inside the vent.
While Cole crawls his way through, he comes across a view of Dash inside the torture chamber,
but finds himself powerless to help. Here Cole witnesses Andrei chop Dash’s arm off,
before drilling a hole into his heart and killing him instantly.
Unfortunately, it is at this time that Cole’s presence gets discovered, so he
crawls his way to another room and sneaks past the henchmen, managing to escape to another room.
He finds a red door with a keypad at the end of the hall and types in the code on the red note.
It works. In the garage he finds the driver waiting for him,
and orders the driver to explain everything.
However, the man tells Cole that he doesn’t has a lot of time, and that Cole better just escape now,
before he hands Cole his car keys and tells him to hide.
Right as Cole hides, the two henchmen enter the garage and upon finding the red note on the floor,
punches the driver and takes him inside, leaving Cole the chance to finally escape,
but he ultimately decides against it because he can't leave his friend behind.
He goes back inside in an effort to save his surviving friends.
Cole then finds and breaks his best friend Thomas out, and leads him away while the
henchmen look for them. After the henchmen exit the room, they exit to the middle of a hall,
but upon hearing someone approach, they rush to the end of the hall and see an elevator shaft.
Trapped with nowhere to go, a henchman walks in with a gun in his hand.
He then lunges at them and ends up falling down the elevator shaft with Thomas.
Now with his best friend dead, Cole breaks down and cries, but realizes that his girlfriend Erin
might still be alive, so he picks up the empty gun on the henchman left on the floor and tries to
find her. While sneaking around, he discovers that Alexei is not only still alive, but is also an
accomplice of Andrei’s. It seems that they found out about the red note the driver slipped to Cole,
so Alexei shoots the driver dead.
Cole quietly trails after them as they left the room.
It doesn’t take long for Cole to discover that the bad guys has brought Erin to the torture chamber.
Without a second thought, Cole breaks through the door and enters the room where Erin has been tied
to a chair. Andrei is quick to point a gun at her and threatens to kill her if Cole doesn’t drop his gun.
Cole sneakily glances at the bullets lying on the table next to him,
while Erin tearfully tells him that it’s okay if she dies, but Cole doesn’t want that to happen,
so he pretends to relent, only to quickly load his gun and shoots the guy.
Devastatingly, Andrei ends up shooting Erin in the head, prompting Cole to wail in agony.
While Cole is distracted, the henchmen walk in and drag Cole inside another room,
but Cole locks himself inside before they could get in.
He manages to escape through another vent and finds himself in an empty, dark room with Alexei.
Angry at Alexei for killing his friends, Cole attacks Alexei and starts brutally punching him and bashes his skull w a gun.
But unexpectedly, a series of giant screens are switched on right after,
revealing the behind the scenes of everything that just went down.
As it turns out, it was all part of an elaborate prank organized by his friends to celebrate his tenth anniversary,
and every detail of the escape room was specifically designed to shock Cole.
Everyone excitedly walks
inside the room to congratulate Cole, only to gasp in horror at the gruesome sight.
Erin and his friends are still alive, looking shock as Cole sits next to Alexei's corpse.
It's too bad that it's seen by hundred of thousands of his fans.
The film ends with a vlog of Cole’s friends, girlfriend,
and Alexei, as they excitedly set up this whole elaborate prank for Cole.