The Vault

An underrecognized indie gem, this webseries encapsulates the best of truly thought-provoking escape room scenarios.

If this series were an actual movie instead of an indie release on YouTube, I'm sure it would've pioneered and even raised the bar for these kinds of mind game movies.

For those interested, this series is complete and available free to watch on the official YouTube channel, VaultShow. It is a must-watch for any fans of the genre.

The one cheap movie they got to do because they made the show is really good and a perfect illustration of this Vault concept. This free YouTube mini series is just about good enough. But it clearly reveals a lack of focus and some inexperience with storytelling. Everything is for example a mystery box and nothing is ever fully told of explored. They throw a billion ideas at the wall thinking the mystery box concept will keep people watching. It does indeed, but when you have not planned out an ending and just invent one at the end after everything is already filmed it reveals some laziness and lack of story understanding. Which is always a shame in such TV shows. They clearly know how to create proper drama and just need to hire in a writer who understands story structure.

The last episode is by far the worst one. Instead of the clever fast paced concept we focus on a slow moody talk about moral values between 2 people and it lasts 20 minutes. Not sure why the filmmakers would lose their focus this way and drop the ball this badly. I think when you get too much self-confidence and power in Hollywood it can lead to this sort of thing where you don't correct you bad ideas and just film whatever you initially think up which is maybe why they haven't been active since making the amazing Circle. They may have lost this hunger for improvement.

It's free so worth a watch if you have time. But without a clear ending and story you may feel it was a bit pointless. And at any rate Circle takes this idea and does it properly with top acting and much more clever and faster plot. This is a cheap college student TV show with random people as actors.