Exit Plan: Hallucinogenic, Slow-Burn Thriller Offers Chills and a Cerebral Buzz
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B
Max Isaksen is suffering through an existential crisis. Once he had everything to live for; he earns a decent wage, has a caring wife who he adores (Tuva Novotny), and a cat to fuss over. He doesn’t even mind his numbing career as an insurance adjuster.
When Max is diagnosed with a brain tumour, he decides to end his life, if only to spare his wife the ordeal of watching his decline. But Max doesn’t want to die, and so his suicide attempts are failures as instinct repeatedly overrides intent, forcing him to pull back from death at the last moment.
Then, in a timely coincidence — the kind as only can be choreographed in film plots — Max comes across the taped confession of a man (the missing husband of a client) who voluntarily hands his life (and death) over to the Hotel Aurora, a facility that specializes in assisted suicides. Under the guise of investigating possible insurance fraud, Max enters the Hotel Aurora where he is treated to all the amenities of a high-end spa vacation. Indeed, the film’s original title was the enticing but highly misleading, Suicide Vacation.
What’s more, the Hotel Aurora’s services come with a promise to provide an individually tailored better life-ending. That might mean dying in the arms of a (fake) mother, a final tryst with a lover or alone in your room with a mountain view of the Aurora Borealis. The only problem is, once committing to their services there is no backing out — that and the hotel-issued pajamas that look disturbingly like concentration camp uniforms.
Exit Plan has thriller potential, the kind the late Michael Crichton once wrote (or at least the kind Crichton wrote when he wrote and directed Coma). But writer Ramus Birch teamed here again with his When Animals Dream (2014) director Jonas Alexander Arnaby brazenly ditches the formality of thrills for a more cerebral buzz. And the film’s wandering timeline that jumps from the present to the past to the imagined to the real can occasionally muddle an already complicated story.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Max hides whatever holdovers are left from his Game of Thrones character, Jaime Lannister, behind thick glasses and a corporate haircut. But unlike Colin Farrell who tackles a comparable role in The Lobster (2015), Coster-Waldau doesn’t over-extend Max’s lumbering self-pity. Armed with faint (very faint) moments of absurd humour, we can appreciate Max as a man who is more than the sum of his anxieties.
Exit Plan works. At times hallucinogenic; at times tranquil. Despite a growing consensus that the film is undermined by its determined and plodding pace, it is by no means ineffective. We can agree that Exit Plan is a slow-burn — slow enough to wonder if the fire wasn’t ignited by rubbing two sticks together —but when the option is to linger over the rapturously executed camera work from cinematographer, Niels Thastum, the pacing drops as an issue.
For those willing to wait it out the film’s doable 90 minutes, Exit Plan has much to offer.
Exit Plan. Directed by Jonas Alexander Arnby. Written by Rasmus Birch. Starring Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Jan Bijvoet, and Kate Ashfield. Available on VOD June 23.