There’s something comforting about how straightforward a good escape room movie is. Be it the pinnacle of genre, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s gourmet iteration, The Platform, which I’m 90 percent sure “inspired” Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef, or the brief wink Thunderbolts* was one in its first act before reverting back to doing what Marvel does best, it’s a premise I can’t get enough of regardless of whether it’s about a bigger topic or just entertaining.
Of all the escape room movies I’ve watched, no film has been as esoteric as Hitoshi Matsumoto’s 2009 film, Symbol.
Symbol, starring Matsumoto as The Man, is a movie about a man who wakes up in an empty room with nothing but buttons on the walls that he must press to get what he wants: out. We’re as lost, if not more, than The Man is in his circumstances. For all we know, he’s woken up barefoot, donned polka-dot pajamas, rocking a bob that’d make Anderson .Paak jealous, and he’s sequestered in a room that’s giving that one time Squidward visited the future in SpongeBob SquarePants.
And those buttons I mentioned earlier, they’re actually the dingalings of countless and occasionally sentient cherub statues poking out from the white room’swalls. By booping their knobs, an infinitesimal amount of random objects are airdropped into the room with The Man. These items range from dreadfully pedantic to random as hell to vital in him figuring out his escape, so long as he remembers what each pecker summons. They can also be the room fucking with him to press a button summoning a giant ass from the sky to fart his entire body into a Yamcha-sized crater, giving him soy sauce after he’d already raw-dogged an entire helping of sushi, or dangling ways out just to Rube Goldberg its way into adding more obstacles for him to overcome. In essence, the mysterious white room in Symbol’s abject purpose is to torture The Man in the most Sisyphean Wile E. Coyote manner imaginable.
For a tight 90 minutes, I witnessed The Man perpetually going through it in ways I’d like to imagine Old Boy‘s Oh Dae-su lost his mind, imprisoned in that apartment complex for years. While the latter’s mania occurred through a time-saving montage, I got to see The Man come completely undone in the liminal space of his escape-room prison in real time.
Watching The Man figure things out is akin to watching a YouTube Let’s Player get close to solving a puzzle you’ve deduced lifetimes ago. That, or reading over someone’s shoulder who takes forever and a day to turn the page. While that agonizingly long walk would be detrimental to any other escape-room flick, it plays to Symbol‘s strengths. Like watching a gorilla from behind double-thick glass at the zoo, I witnessed The Man lose every possible linguistic faculty he once had—outraged by the room fucking with him, dangling means to escape only to rug-pull him like Lucy would Charlie Brown in Peanuts comic strips—to the point where he could only pantomime what he was thinking and feeling and punctuate it with primordial grunts.
Whether that’s some grand metaphor for what it’s like waking up every day and making sense of the world, I don’t know. But I felt a spiritual connection to him, where his growing frustration, Pyrrhic sense of accomplishment, and crash-out was my own. It was kind of beautiful in its own escape-room, performance-art kinda way.
Oh, also, there’s a Nacho Libre-esque Luchador storyline about a wrestler named Escargot Man that puzzlingly serves as the movie’s A-plot, if you can believe that. Somehow, its storyline about the wimpy wrestler winning the big one in front of his son miraculously dovetails into what The Man is up to in his escape room purgatory in ways I wouldn’t deign to spoil the surprise of.
Symbol isn’t streaming anywhere, sadly, so you’ll have to be savvy about how you find it in the wild. The internet is your friend, and whatnot. If you do find it, watch it high, or don’t. Symbol is guaranteed to be a trip either way.
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