"Escape From Tomorrow" (2013)

For many, going to Disney World is the ultimate dream. Escape From Tomorrow turns that dream into a nightmare. Shot DIY, under the radar of Disney's restriction of filming at the theme park, the film plays off Disney's sunny, innocent facade by suggesting something more sinister and evil lies underneath the surface of the amusements and rides. A family goes to the park and the father Jim White (Roy Abramsohn) starts slowly losing his grip on reality. In one sense, the film is about a father whose frustrated by losing the life he had now that he's married and has children (Writer-director Randy Moore claims the film is based on his own experiences with his father when his parents were getting divorced). He stops caring about his children and his spouse, predatorily stalks two nubile French teens, and begins seeing inexplicable, disturbing things creeping into the background. The faces of the people in It's a Small World start looking like demons hiding in plain sight. A single mother becomes an enchantress who bends reality. In short, nothing is quite what it appears to be and that works well for playing against expectations of what the happiest place on Earth ought to be like. The black and white look of the film feeds into this; there's a trippy, darkly alluring quality to the film. It slowly draws you in by being both highly mundane and yet uncannily surreal. The film really is only able to manage this feat for so long. The last third of the film gets a little too bonkers for its own good and the film loses some of its dark seductive appeal in the process. This last third wholly embraces the craziness that has only been suggested up to that point (for much of the first two thirds, there's hints that this might all be inside the head of the father). Still, Escape From Tomorrow largely succeeds at being unsettling and entrancing by taking something familiar and flipping it on its head in ways that feel a little too close to reality for comfort, even as it seems otherworldly.

Grade: 3/4 ★★★