Safe Space

There are bad movies, and then there's Safe Space (2022), Stefan Kubicki's baffling attempt at... well, I'm not entirely sure what. A thriller? A social commentary? An experimental art piece? Whatever it was supposed to be, the result is an incoherent, tone-deaf disaster that left me staring at the credits in disbelief, wondering if I'd just been the victim of a two-hour fever dream.

The premise, as best as I can piece together, involves an attempt at an elaborate escape room that quickly devolves into chaos with a fine line between reality and fiction. Sounds promising on paper, right? Unfortunately, Kubicki seems to have taken "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" as a guiding principle. Characters appear, deliver dialogue that feels like it was generated by a broken chatbot, and then vanish without explanation. Subplots sprout like weeds and die just as quickly. Themes are hinted at-mental health, community, isolation-but never developed, leaving the audience drowning in half-baked ideas and cringe-worthy melodrama.

Then there's the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue. Every conversation feels like a first draft written at 3 a.m. While scrolling social media. Characters speak in stilted proclamations or nonsensical tangents that don't resemble how humans actually communicate. Emotional beats land with all the grace of a lead balloon because the actors, bless them, have nothing to work with. It's hard to fault the cast when the script gives them lines that sound like motivational posters stapled together.

Cinematography? A mix of confusing interiors and inexplicable shaky-cam that kicks in at random moments, as if the camera operator suddenly remembered they had somewhere else to be. Pacing? Glacial when it should be tense, manic when it should be calm. By the 90-minute mark, I wasn't on the edge of my seat-I was begging for mercy.

Kubicki's direction suggests ambition, but ambition without clarity is chaos, and Safe Space is pure chaos. It's not even the kind of bad that's fun to watch with friends over drinks. It's the kind of bad that makes you question what went wrong in every stage of production. How did no one step in and say, "This doesn't make sense"? How did this script get greenlit? How did this end up as the final cut?

In the end, Safe Space isn't just bad-it's aggressively bad, a baffling, joyless mess that fails on nearly every level. I cannot believe how bad it is, and I don't recommend finding out for yourself.

Rating: 0.5/10 - Avoid at all costs.

Plot

Three couples and a lonely friend visit an isolated escape room in the middle of the desert run by a mysterious Ukrainian performance artist.

Cast

Outside of Annie Hamilton I knew nobody involved, and even then she's a background player and a face you'll remember but not be able to put a name to.

Verdict

Safe Space was the missus's pick, after last weeks horrendous In The Lost Lands (2025) she had a lot to make up for and after reading the premise she thought this was that horror sub-genre we love so much but is hard to put a name to. Well it's not, it's not even horror, it's barely even a movie at all.

The film opens with character development and got our attention, the characters were a cluster of stereotypes, a combination of uninspired, boring and unlikeable and then when things start to happen (And I use that very very loosely) it falls apart. It kept my attention because I was interested to see how they were going to put it all together but by the half way point I realized they weren't going to be able to and this would just be a disjointed arthouse mess with ambiguous meanings.

I cannot stress how bad Safe Space is, when the credits rolled the pair of us looked at one another in disbelief. I joked that she now can't be trusted to pick movies and we spent the next few minutes picking the film apart, trying to make sense of it, but there was no sense to make.

I cannot fathom who Safe Space is aimed at, what genre it falls under, or how anyone would find this even remotely entertaining.

Rants

I would rather watch in The Lost Lands again than endure 5 more minutes of this. I think I'd rather watch Birdemic and it's sequel, directors cut editions! You know what, I'd rather watch every Sharknado back to back without breaks, having only shaved toe nail clippings and sloth pee as my snacks. What were these people thinking?

The Good

Gets your attention initially

The Bad

Your attention is grabbed, for the wrong reasons Bland characters Makes no sense Pretentious nonsense.

This genre defying film is a comedy, a thriller and a relationship drama all at once. It gets in your head and you keep unpacking its implications long after you are done watching. The production design and editing deserve special mention. Highly recommend you watch it and share it - good independent cinema deserves our support.

Great film exploring themes I want to be thinking more about in my own life, and lovely to see an honest take on where the thinking has landed them. I won't give much away, but definitely worth a watch-it's a fun ride.

Also, a reminder to try mushrooms again 😝

And do more games with your friends!

Also, as someone who has never done an escape room personally, I think this fully encapsulated everything about the experience for me, what I thought it was, what I hoped it could be, and so much more than I ever expected.

And one final note, since it doesn't need to be said but I'll say it anyway: The production design is terrific! 💖✨

Safe Space is movie that had me scratching my head from about the 1/3 mark because it's from there that it starts to make no sense. It reminded me of the tv show Lost, it kept giving you questions to ask but at no point did it bother answering any of them. Then suddenly it ends leaving me confused and angry. This isn't a movie.