The horror film Escape the Field smooshes Stephen King into Squid Game

polygon.com:

Randomly stumbling across something enjoyably bizarre while flipping channels is a lost experience in the streaming era. To its dubious credit, the new Lionsgate B-programmer horror-thriller Escape the Field recreates that “What the hell isthis?” feeling by dropping viewers into a film without any of the annoying trappings of character establishment or world-building. Watching this movie, the debut feature of writer-director Emerson Moore, feels like picking up a TV series midway through the second season, after all the players and their relationships have already been established.

The premise feels similarly disconnected.Escape the Field combines In The Tall Grass’ setting, Escape Room’s structure, and Squid Game’s creative torture methods into something that’s bizarre, but familiar at the same time. On paper, it sounds like the setup for a video game: Six strangers wake up in a seemingly never-ending cornfield, with no memory of how they got there. Each of them has been given a tool, some of them more useful than others — shades of another probable inspiration, Kinji Fukasaku’s 2000 cult classic Battle Royale. Each of those tools is engraved with a symbol, presumably the logo of the malevolent, all-powerful entity that’s holding them there.

In Fukasaku’s film, however, the “players” are given clear instructions for how to proceed in their game. And in Squid Game, the ruling entity’s sadistic intentions do eventually become entirely clear. Not so much here, as overworked doctor Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins) discovers when she wakes up amid the cornstalks, still wearing the scrubs she fell asleep in. Confused, she wanders around and runs into Tyler (Theo Rossi), a nonthreatening dad type also trapped in the maze.

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