‘Escape Room’s Zoey Davis is a Stellar Final Girl
Taylor Russell’s Zoey Davis from the Escape Room series is one of the best final girls around. It isn’t evident at first. When Adam Robitel’s Escape Room launched in January 2019, it came tethered to unfair expectations. The cast, despite the likes of Deborah Ann Wolf and Logan Miller, wasn’t exactly abounding in recognizable, A-list talent. The concept, a kind of cross between Saw and Cube, but with teeny-bopper violence, seemed incompatible. And, of course, it bowed in January, largely considered a studio dumping month, especially for horror movies (that’s a myth, by the way).
Russell’s Zoey was the audience entry point, and for the first two acts of the movie, she was dull. A meek bystander, capable of solving puzzles, but reticent to speak or act beyond that. Ostensibly, Zoey was horror’s worst impulse. A dull, nice caricature that everyone could relate to that paradoxically meant no one could really relate at all. And then, she starts smashing crap.
The surviving players of the game arrive in a hospital room. All is revealed—each player was the sole survivor (not the Eliza Dushku kind) of a terrible accident, and the game they’re trapped in endeavors to reveal whether that was mere luck or something else. Zoey realizes this first, and in a complete shift in character, loses it. She starts smashing cameras, tossing set dressing around, and demanding the other players quit the game. Better to stay where they are and take a stand rather than continue the perverse experiment. It’s incredible.
Zoey is ostensibly left for dead, only to arrive in deus ex machina fashion at the end, saving Logan Miller’s Ben from the “Gamemaster.” Every year, he assembles a group of people with something in common so wealthy clients can bet on who is most likely to survive (Hostel, anyone). Sure, the mechanics and infrastructure don’t make any sense, and that incredulity is compounded when Zoey spots newspaper articles on the deaths of the other players, killed in “accidents,” no mention of the game. Still, Zoey is committed. Having imbued herself with a newfound urgency and endearing combativeness, she’s determined to stop the game for good.
In Escape Room: Tournament of Champions, that’s exactly what she endeavors to do. En route to Manhattan, she and Ben are once again trapped in a game (sort of like Amanda in Saw II), and alongside the other survivors, must overcome several devilishly puzzling rooms. And that it not only works, but works remarkably well, is almost exclusively on account of Russell’s Davis. Russell is no stranger to genre fare. She astounded in Netflix’s Lost in Space reboot and was absolutely transcendent in Bones and All. Yet, it’s in Escape Room where she really comes into her own.
Zoey Davis as a character is perfectly conceived, striking an adroit balance between resourcefulness and terror. It’s the same stellar balance that rendered Sharni Vinson’s Erin a fan favorite in Adam Wingard’s You’re Next. Zoey is capable of surviving, but not too capable. She isn’t performing feats outside the constraints of human ability. When it comes to puzzle solving, Zoey contributes a great deal, though her survival is equally predicated on her peers, many of whom reach the tantalizing answer before she does.
What it means, principally, is that Zoey is motivated internally, not externally. Her arc in the series is all the more compelling for it. She isn’t simply a savant, nor is she a physical brute capable of muscling her way through all the puzzles. She’s both vulnerable and intelligent, a key member of the team whose abilities never exceed narrative rationality. It makes her many close calls compelling. The stakes imbue Escape Room with the requisite tension it needs as a PG-13 thriller to survive. Absent gore—a trope for the “locked room” subgenre”—the series needed character and stakes. With Zoey Davis, it has both.
As Taylor Russell’s career continues to grow, there’s no telling whether she will continue to dabble in genre fare or go the conventional route of leaving the genre behind altogether. With Escape Room: Tournament of Champions grossing considerably less than its predecessor ($65 million versus the first’s $155 million), the odds are even slimmer that Russell will return for another entry (unless, of course, there’s a third cut audiences haven’t seen yet). Still, in terms of gateway horror, the Escape Room series is one of the best in recent memories. And with Taylor Russell in the lead, it’s refreshingly, enthrallingly unique.
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