Thematically, No Escape is exactly the kind of film one might expect from its makers. Brothers Drew and John Erick Dowdle have a track record of making slick, gut-wrenching horror films about people trapped in nightmare situations. They quarantined an entire building with super-rabies, in Quarantine. They stuck some folks in an elevator with the devil, in Devil. They sent a few adventurers into the cult world of dark catacombs below Paris, in As Above, So Below.

No Escape, then, makes sense. Set in an unnamed South East Asian nation, No Escape is the story of one American family trapped inside a violent political coup. The film is made with undeniable technical skill: the action is gripping, the performances by Owen Wilson and Lake Bell (especially) are moving. By most accounts, this is a successful, white-knuckling thriller.

Well, there is one exception: No Escape is wretchedly insensitive. For two hours audiences watch a white family on the run in a nameless country, fighting to survive a nameless mob of Asians mercilessly trying to slaughter them. There’s some pretense for the rebels behavior. A British ex-pat played by Pierce Brosnan talks for a minute or two about debt, western national interests, and the exploitation of water rights, infusing the movie with a political context for the unrelenting violence. But this comes off as little more than lip service. These rebels are monsters, taking great pleasure in the murder of white people.

If ‘wretchedly insensitive’ seems too strong a statement, know that critics generally agree.

Alonso Duralde, at the Wrap, puts the film in the company of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda work and D.W. Griffith’s klan-hero story Birth of a Nation. Duralde thinks the film operates with a “queasily racist subtext,” which “surrounds our American protagonists with a bloodthirsty, faceless Yellow Peril.” At the Washington Post, Stephanie Merry calls the film out for “stereotyping an entire region of the world,” by presenting SE Asia as “as little more than a dangerous hotbed of machete-wielding savages.” Justin Chang, film critic at Variety, is more succinct, describing No Escape as a “morally rank slab of cultural exploitation.”

No Escape was made in Thailand, and it is only the latest film to set the trials and tribulations of white visitors against a backdrop of death, devastation, or just plain anonymity in Southeast Asia. During and after the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese became a popular cinematic bad-guy. The best films to come out that war, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, had little need for complicated characterization; such stories only need SE Asian actors to inhabit nameless wartime opposition and prostitutes.

Since then, things have changed surprisingly little. In 2000, Leonardo DiCaprio would travel to Thailand to find some himself, and “a little danger” in The Beach; he does so by going to an exotic island inhabited by white tourists and Thai pot farmers. In 2012, The Impossible portrayed the struggles of a white family on vacation when the 2004 tsunami struck the region. That film cast nature as its villain, but its emotional core depended on using thousands of dead Asian men, women and children as little more than set dressing for a white family drama. Even the low-brow comedy of The Hangover II reduces Thailand to criminality and savagery as the rule.

No Escape outdoes all of these films. The rebels in this movie are nothing short of zombies, mindlessly pursuing the death of any white person they see. One moment has Pierce Brosnan describing the rebels as family men, the next has those rebels attempting to rape Lake Bell and gleefully tormenting children. Do the Dowdle’s think that this is the behavior of SE Asian family men?

Like No Escape, each of these films succeeds in their own way. American war movies tell American war stories, and the morass of the Vietnam War is well-documented in Apocalypse Now and Platoon and The Deer Hunter. In The Impossible, Naomi Watts gives a harrowing and powerful performance as a mother desperate for her family and her work makes that movie worth seeing. Even The Beach recommends itself as an odd addition to the career of Danny Boyle. (The Hangover II, however, is terrible).

Cinematic achievement does not always accompany empathetic storytelling. It does not always have to, either. One reason the violent revenge-fantasy John Wick works is because of its rejection of our emotional expectations. But a ‘whites in danger’ movie, set in Asia, requires cinematic empathy. It costs nothing and adds much to recognize the humanity of every character in a movie.

Dear #HungerGames. We've taken your sign as our own. Our struggle is non-fiction. Thanks. #ThaiCoup #Thailand pic.twitter.com/nGaYJIdj05

— Manik Sethisuwan (@ManikSethisuwan) June 1, 2025

While watching No Escape, I could not stop thinking about the fact that just last year Thailand did undergo a political coup, which happened to take place two weeks after No Escape ended production. A military takeover occurred, which led to protests in the streets. The transfer of power and protests that followed were mostly peaceful. But powerful images surfaced from those Thai protests, and they were not of anonymous acts of murder and violence.

They were images of protesters making the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games movies. A social-media campaign followed, using pop culture as a way to communicate a political struggle to the world and appeal to a broad audience for justice. Such human behavior is the opposite of the unrelenting murderous savagery on display in No Escape.

How did this happen? Why did this movie get set in a political coup in the first place? How is the government in Thailand and elsewhere reacting to the movie? Who better to ask than the filmmakers themselves?

I sat down with the Dowdles. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Why did you set this film during a coup in SE Asia?

JOHN: It was inspired from that setting. My dad and I went to Thailand, on the day we got there, there was a coup. The Generals took over the city, kicked the prime minister out. We were there, and there was a new regime, armed guards. It was scary to be there in the midst of something like that. There was no advanced warning. You don’t think something like that will happen. And I started to think, what if you had little kids with you? What if something really bad happened? That coup was smooth, but what if it wasn’t?

I started to think about other coups. When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh in 1975. There are certain coups that went badly in that same region.

DREW: We had conversations about, what would that look like in South America, or in other parts of the world. SE Asia was the right place. It so foreign, we don’t have the same kind of history in SE Asia that we might in Africa. The Middle East means something very different. We felt like we have a good relationship with SE Asia but most Americans don’t really know it that well. The language is foreign. There were a lot of reasons that SE Asia was the most interesting place to set this movie.

Setting the movie in a real place—the country is not named but this is a real geopolitical location—that creates a tension as filmmakers in managing cultural representation.

DREW: We didn’t want to make a statement about any one country. That seemed like the wrong thing to do. We wanted the rebels to have a human motivation. They believe they’re fighting for their survival too. They feel like they’ve been wronged.

You mean Hammond’s (Pierce Brosnan) conversation about corporate exploitation and taking the water rights.

DREW: Hammond tells us they rebels are not wrong. The violence is wrong. There’s nothing that justifies that kind of violence. But they feel like they’re fighting against what we’ve been doing for a long time. We think these are situations that exist. There have been similar uprisings, massive global companies that are investing in these countries that are not designed to help, but are attempting to get countries to default. That angle felt like we could give this uprising a real motivation and not just savagery for savagery’s sake.

It’s pretty savage though. No Escape is not that many degrees removed from a zombie movie. It has that pulse, that driving force of urgency. Why did you add the political element to this film?

JOHN: What’s scary about zombies is the mindless quality. We wanted this rebellion to have a mind and to have a focus and to have a rationale. So often when there is a conflict we forget to ask why, why is the other side doing what they’re doing?

There was a military coup in Thailand last year. Were you there when that happened?

DREW: The coup happened two weeks after we wrapped. But it was heating up the whole time we were there. We were away from that action but we were concerned that if the country fell into full coup mode we ight have to pack up and leave. This kind of movie we might not have had the money to come back. Having that kind of thing in the background when you’re shooting a movie is very nerve-wracking.

How is the film being received in SE Asia? Is it playing? Is it going to play? I saw it has been banned in Cambodia.

DREW: It hasn’t opened yet so we don’t really know. There was a rumor that it was banned in Thailand, but that’s not true. I don’t know if it was ever planned on being released in Cambodia.

JOHN: I don’t know if movies play in Cambodia. I don’t know if Cambodia has a cinema distribution system. The old king was making movies, for a while, he and his wife…

You haven’t heard any pushback from SE Asian governments or people?

DREW: No. We worked very closely with the government of Thailand. There were some things we had to avoid to make sure we were cool, though.

JOHN: The government there is using us on their flyers for their new tax incentives. They’re using as an an example of a film being made there, that it works.