No Escape Room

A dad's trying to make his one weekend a month with his disinterested teen daughter a fun one, but their car breaks down. But wait, the town they're in has an escape room, and she's mentioned those, so they go. They meet three other people they'll be working with, and an odd young woman named Josie who offers them tea and explains the house was owned by an inventor and that there are rumors about it. The game begins, and things go wrong.

I think my biggest issue with the movie is it can't decide what kind of horror it's going for. Are there monsters loose in the house? Sometimes, maybe. Is it ghosts? Possibly. Is there time travel? Apparently so. What's the deal with the scene where the dad steps through a door and ends up next to a river and a random woman emerges to make out with him until chains wrap around him and nearly drag him underwater (but don't, for reasons that are also unclear)? When one of the other players picks up the phone and is talking to her earlier self, why does she just repeat what she heard herself say? Why does she still tell her boyfriend to run away, even knowing how that ended for him (badly)?

If the inventor is interested in the dead and the spirit realm, why would he be fucking with time travel? Why all the weird locks and gears in the walls of the house? In that sense, the house reminds me of the one from Thirteen Ghosts, except it looks normal instead of being all clear glass walls and whatnot.

Entirely out of nowhere late in the movie, the daughter hypothesizes that they are caught in an "echo" as she puts it. Why would she come to that specific conclusion at that moment? Why does the monster wait as long as it does to drag away the guy that came alone? It's not even a particularly effective moment, and we don't ever see a body. It's like they realized, "oops, we need this character to be dead now," and so they just did it.

The movie could have done something with the tea being drugged and it being a sort of slow-creeping, unsettling horror where they can't trust their eyes. Things being just a bit off-center. Or it could have really leaned into things being messed up, but done a better job establishing some sort of rules for how that shit worked. It didn't really do either, but I guess the title is accurate based on the ending. Points for that?