Early in No Exit, a group of travelers that are left trapped by a blizzard gathers together at a rest stop to wait out the snowstorm. These five people confined until the weather eases up decide to play the card game "Bullshit." Each person lays down their card face down, stating what their card is, and if the person is caught bluffing, the other players can call “bullshit.” While the game is a way for the audience to get to know more about the characters, it’s also a foreshadowing to the audience’s reaction to No Exit, as the twists and turns in the film will undoubtedly leave the viewer frequently screaming “bullshit” at the cards No Exit is laying down.

The primary focus of these five confined characters is Darby (Havana Rose Liu), who has broken out of her seventh rehab stint in order to see her hospitalized mother. On the way, Darby gets stuck in the snowstorm and receives a text from her sister saying that Darby’s mother doesn’t want to see her anyway. Instead of going back the way she came or getting lost amongst the blizzard, Darby heads to the rest stop along with other stuck drivers until the storm dies down. Amongst the other travelers is Ed and Sandi (Dennis Haysbert and Dale Dickey, respectively), a married couple heading to Reno, the shifty Lars (David Rysdahl), and the affable Ash (Danny Ramirez). When Darby discovers a little girl (Mila Harris) tied up in one of the traveler’s cars, Darby has to figure out who has kidnapped this child, while also trying to figure out how to help the kid without putting Darby and the kid in danger.

At times, No Exit almost feels like a mid-2000s thriller, akin to Identity or Vacancy, with director Damien Power putting all the characters and clues of this mystery on the table, before letting things go nuts. But what holds No Exit back from becoming an enthralling thriller is a tonal inconsistency that flies to various extremes throughout the film. What begins as a suspense film that feels like it was made for Freeform then wildly shifts into absurd violence and brutality that borders on hilarious. It’s one thing to make the audience feel the calm before the storm, but it’s another to make such a drastic switch that seems like little more than a way to have an exciting conclusion to your mostly slow-burn story.

no-exit-social

RELATED: 'No Exit' Trailer Reveals a Chilling Search for Evil Featuring Havana Rose Liu

No Exit also relies too heavily on coincidences and leaps in logic that become silly instead of intense and shocking. For what it’s worth, No Exit—written by Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, based on the Taylor Adams book of the same name—does knock its main mystery out fairly quickly, turning this into a story about how Darby will deal with her situation and not focused on the whodunit aspect. But again, it’s the third act where the twists and turns and aggressively ridiculous violence start to mess up the flow. The amount of curveballs, from character reveals to an extremely questionable use of drugs almost as an effective tool for escape, really drags down what the film has done up to this point.

But overall, No Exit just sort of feels like a bunch of disparate ideas thrown together in a film that is neither as thrilling nor as tense as it wants to be. Barrer and Ferrari’s screenplay never does anything worthwhile with Darby’s substance abuse, while the wooden script doesn’t do any of its characters any favors. It’s a shame to hear solid actors like Haysbert and Dickey try to make such clunky dialogue work, but the script is also detrimental to what could’ve worked as a solid little riddle of a film, making certain characters seem more suspicious and obvious as culprits than they probably should.

In the beginning, No Exit is a fine, slightly suspenseful, and occasionally claustrophobic story. Yet in its third act, No Exit throws caution to the wind and gets recklessly wild, with insane twists, over-the-top and laughable violence, and the dubious handling of Darby’s addiction story. No Exit stays on track at first, but Power’s film just can’t land No Exit’s ludicrous conclusion.

Rating: C

No Exit is available on Hulu now.