Disability is in Everything (Including our Villains): NO EXIT

Warning: HARK! There are spoilers here, traveler. Take the road less littered with thought.

I recently watched Hulu's new original movie No Exit (2022) directed by Damien Power and adapted from the novel No Exit by Taylor Adams.

If I'm being honest, there were moments I absolutely adored. The protagonist Darby Thorne (Havana Rose Lu) is a recovering addict, driving through a snowstorm, desperately trying to reach her dying mother. Lu conquered an incredibly demanding, physical, and emotional performance, that I'll probably remember while I watch future performances that lack that same authentic projection of pain she brings with her acting.

And the set was gorgeous. The combination of snow and darkness, a pair that feels natural yet never fails to freeze my breath, trapping itself in my lungs like I'm on a jog when I witness the hero, usually bleeding out hot and red-boiled liquid with nothing but the night sky and the disheartening knowledge that the only light source, the bright glow of another human's face, scared and alone as they, to only have their desperate eyes, mirrored in their knife, along with the reflective surface of the ice? Incredible. Beautiful. I love the cold chill, freezing my smile for days.

However. I struggle to move on, be on the writer's and director's side of the story, and be eager to enter into the creation of their worlds, if that world-building, that narrative is built off assumptions; fiction built on a house of lies is an adventure. Horror webbed from a spool of wrongful ideals, braided with falseness, and the promise of someone's demise is not worth the watch. I had two prominent issues with two characters specifically.

The focus on Darby's addiction gave me high hopes in the beginning yet lost me once it became obvious that No Exit was not a story interested in challenging who or who does not belong in the "hero" role (which traditionally, addicts are usually depicted as having 'complicated agendas' rather than full fledge champions and don't get people who use their hyper-vigilance, super sensitive natures for agentive purposes, regardless of society's moral standing on narcotics). But rather more inclined to wield Darby's addiction as a tool for when the plot became stale.

When one of the kidnappers taunts Darby about her addiction and her mother's rejection, due to a past we know nothing about, we, as the audience are supposed to scream "She's more than an addict! She's a good person!" - but what if both truths existed together? What if No Exit was a movie about an addict, who saves a young girl and then her life continues, sober or not? What does Darby's eventual sobriety have to do with her ability to do the right thing? Nothing, in my opinion. And I find it irresponsible for the story to try to connect those two life circumstances as if Darby's sobriety is deeply connected with her moral goodness and that her willingness to be brave, as a hint for her eventual recovery, hidden deep inside of her - we didn't need it. We didn't need a chance to say "See, I told you she'd come out on top." Because we already saw it. We already witnessed Darby rise to the occasion on that mountain, using what little drugs she had to left to save her and that little girl's life. Brave and addicted.

There's also the issue with Lars, a very obvious autistic archetype. I'm aware that some of the fun in No Exist is playing with the audience's assumptions. The movie does, and purposely, wants you to second guess the obvious creep-dom that is Lars: a sulking figure in the corner. An explosive, greasy-hair, awkwardly-stomping, shoulders-slacked, slow-speaking, socially inept, unfriendly, white-van-driving, killer - it's not creative or relatively new to use an audience's internalized ableism against them. Nor is it as surprising, as it is disappointing, to see a writer or a director fall into their own trap.

I'm not sure if Taylor Adams or Damien Power really thought they were doing something when they had Lars and Ash, the other, more charismatic kidnapper, have a "saviorist", almost Of Mice and Men dynamic in their brotherhood. I'm not sure if Lars's injury, and Ash's failure to "protect" his disabled brother from death, were supposed to soften Ash's sins, the same person who manipulated Lars into kidnapping Jay in the first place. The same brother who used the stereotyped assumptions about Lars, made by Darby, Sandi, and Ed, who all verbalize their dislike of Lars based on his vibes (or their *cough, cough* ableism) as a strategic move, rather than challenge their view of Lars? Getting rid of the danger, placing Lars in harm's way, birthed out from the other's suspicions of him? And now, because we watched Ash grieve over Lars's body, we're supposed to sympathize with Ash? Make it make sense. Make it so that characters like Lars, who are amongst the imperfect, like the rest of the cast, don't somehow receive most of the violence, solely because he fits nicely into our idea of a shallow villain, not even worthy of their own devious qualities outside of his appearance. Criminalized for the way he moves in the world, instead of his complicity with Ash's trafficking schemes.