Follow Me  ★★★

ESCAPE Room was billed as a horror film on its release in 2017 but achieved success mainly because it wasn’t very frightening and therefore could attract a wider, video game savvy audience.

In terms of horror, writer/director Will Wernick basically took the concept of the Saw films and stripped the gore out to create a film about people trying to get out of rooms, admittedly before they died.

There is a sequel to Escape Room on the way but, in the meantime, Wernick’s latest is a better effort.

For Follow Me he has again repeated the previous premise and referenced liberally from Eli Roth’s torture porn Hostel series to basically serve up ‘Escape Room plus gore’.

The film’s first act is, frankly, pretty ho-hum and had me concerned that we were going to be stuck with a bunch of annoying characters filmed by hand-held camera.

Social media personality Cole has made a living filming himself and friends putting themselves in dangerous situations. His VLOG has become popular for pushing the limits and people throughout the World keep tabs to find out what’s next.

His VLOG is approaching a milestone and Cole is looking for something big to wow his audience. One of his friends has been in touch with one of Cole’s fans who happens to be a Russian millionaire and can organise a group of people to take part in an ultra-realistic experience.

Cole and a group of friends travel to Moscow and are taken to a huge warehouse in a remote part of the city. There they are filmed in every room trying to solve physical clues in order to evade seemingly death-defying situations. Eventually they realise the risks and stakes are far more than they anticipated.

While Wernick doesn’t yet have the film-making skill or attention to detail of somebody like Roth, some of the trap sequences are quite tense and the gore level is enough to satisfy stronger horror fans.

With Follow Me, he at least demonstrates some passion for horror that could produce something special in the future.