Damien Power’s No Exit is the kind of taut, small-scale thriller I love. It sets up a story and lets it evolve and reveal itself naturally, and when one source of tension dissipates, the movie has enough confidence to let it go. It has a few tricky reveals, but there’s a refreshing lack of contrivance. Actually, the fact that Power doesn’t put his thumb on the scale makes for two of the film’s biggest shocks. I would normally say it’s the kind of movie they don’t make anymore–pure genre entertainment at a tightly-plotted 90 minutes, its storytelling executed with no frills–only here it is, premiering in 2022. It just gives you hope. (Well, it gives me hope. Rotten Tomatoes suggests I may be in the minority on that front.)
Havana Rose Liu plays Darby, an addict white-knuckling her way through an unwanted stint in a recovery center. She’s cynical, tenacious, difficult, and brave. She wants to go see her mother, who is in the hospital and may not pull through, but her sister firmly tells her to stay put. Her presence will only make things worse. (Liu gives Darby sharp enough edges that we can believe this without even having to resort to clichés about addiction.) Instead of listening, Darby steals a car and starts driving to the hospital in Salt Lake.
A blizzard forces her off the road, and a cop directs her to a rest stop he’s opened up. She can spend the night there, and the interstate will probably open up again in the morning.
Darby arrives at the isolated, snowbound visitors center and meets her fellow stranded travelers–and then she goes out into the parking lot to search for even a flicker of cell signal, and she spots a little girl tied up and gagged in the back of someone’s van. She can’t reach the police, she doesn’t know who the van belongs to, and she doesn’t know if revealing what she’s discovered will turn the night into a bloodbath. She just has to do the best she can to save the little girl and get out of all this alive.
It’s a Hateful Eight-style setup–which one of these mysterious travelers has a dark secret?–but as I said up top, the film lets its story evolve as it goes along, smoothly shifting subgenres rather than laying in red herring after red herring to draw the whodunnit out long enough to fill the whole runtime. It also manages some effective sketches of characterization, and it’s aided in that by a remarkably solid cast: in addition to Liu, Danny Ramirez, Dale Dickey, and Dennis Haysbert are all quite good here.
If I could pull out any part of the movie to act as a microcosm of how the whole thing works, I’d choose the baggie of cocaine Darby finds in her getaway car at the start of the film. She doesn’t snort it the second she finds it … but she does hold onto it. You can feel her intense longing for it, something that gets ratcheted up by self-loathing as she reads through her sister’s texts. You can almost hear her thinking that if she’s not wanted anyway, why shouldn’t she get high? Why is she trying to turn her life around when it seems like there’s no life for her to go back to? Still, she just puts it back in her pocket. My wife and I were speculating at this point on what would become of Chekhov’s cocaine. Maybe she would try to accuse someone, and then the drugs would fall out of her pocket and she would be painted as unreliable. Maybe, in a bitter twist, she would save the little girl but then be arrested for possession. Maybe she would be forcibly drugged despite her desire to stay clean. These are all a little forced, but they’re things we’d seen before.
Instead, Darby resists the allure of the coke until she’s in desperate need of a painkiller and upper to keep going–and instead of looking at the baggie and then dramatically hurling it away and Finding Strength Within Herself, she just goes ahead and does the coke, because she’s in physical agony. Apparently this moment drew a fair bit of criticism, but I’m quite fond of it: it feels natural, like the decision the character would reasonably make in that moment (survival takes precedence; worry about the rest later) rather than the movie making sure to make the right points about addiction and recovery. Darby’s recovery is important to the film–and, to some extent, to her–but it still lets this scene exist in its ambiguous, neutral form, and I appreciate that.
No Exit is streaming on Hulu.