This Spanish Thriller Beat the ‘Escape Room’ Movies by Over a Decade (2024)

Escape rooms were, well, inescapable in the 2010s, and they’re still a pretty popular group activity today. While the themes can range from treasure hunting to a fantasy setting, horror rooms are one of the most popular styles, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood eventually capitalized on the trend with Adam Robitel’s Escape Room in 2019. But just a few years before the trend really took off, and a decade before Escape Room, a Spanish film called Fermat’s Room from 2007 had already tapped into the concept’s potential for fear and suspense. Co-directed by Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña, Fermat’s Room features a group of people locked into a room and forced to solve mathematical puzzles before time runs out or the walls of the room will crush them to death. The unique threat of death and the intrigue surrounding who has trapped the characters and why make Fermat’s Room a tense thriller that was just ahead of the curve.

What Is ‘Fermat’s Room’ About?

If you thought math in school was hard enough, try solving equations under the threat of death. Fermat’s Room is about a group of strangers invited to a sort of think-tank to help solve a “mathematical enigma.” Once the four arrive at the designated meeting point inside a warehouse, they meet a man calling himself “Fermat" (Federico Luppi) in reference to a mathematician; in fact, all the guests have been given aliases referencing famed mathematicians and philosophers: Galois (Alejo Sauras), Oliva (Elena Ballesteros), Pascal (Santi Millan), and Hilbert (Lluís Harmon).

The group enjoys dinner in the back room of the warehouse, but Fermat is called away afterward. When the rest of the group tries to leave, they find that the door to the room has been locked, and a PDA suddenly shows a math puzzle and a one-minute timer. The guests manage to solve the puzzle, but because they go over the time limit, the walls of the room suddenly press inwards; it becomes apparent that with each puzzle solved outside the time limit, the walls of the room will close in on them until they’re crushed to death – unless they can find a way to escape. As the math problems get harder and fear sets in, suspicions about the real mastermind behind the deadly game arise, and secrets about the players’ true identities are revealed.

‘Fermat’s Room’ Turned Puzzles Deadly Years Before ‘Escape Room’

Adam Robitel’s 2019 Escape Room is one of the first movies to capitalize specifically on the real-life escape room concept, but it’s clearly not the first one to incorporate puzzle solving into its horror. The Cube series, which began in the early 90s, and even the Saw franchise (especially the first film) both involved mysterious rooms that contained deadly traps for those unable to figure out the solution to escaping. However, with Cube, the puzzle aspect is usually more about just avoiding certain rooms, whereas Saw’s solutions are often less about logic than they are about endurance. But Fermat’s Room came closest to a legitimate escape room experience before that concept had really broached the social consciousness, forcing the characters to not only work out math puzzles to avoid certain doom, but also having them discover their means of escape by examining aspects of the room itself.

Not only was Fermat’s Room ahead of the curve on the escape room trend, it’s also a solid suspense film. The threat of slowly being crushed to death is disturbing and ever-present, and there’s also a threat of poison gas at one point. On top of that, Fermat’s Room is a tale of revenge at its core, but with more than just the locked room as a twist; the person responsible for locking up the four main characters wants retribution, but not from all of them. At least one of the characters is a red herring, which actually makes the antagonist even more chilling, because they’re willing to cause collateral damage unrelated to their own revenge. Fermat’s Room may not be as bloody as the films that came before and after, but it feels just as tense.

Robitel’s Escape Room and its sequel Tournament of Champions may have staked a claim on the actual name “escape room,” but Fermat’s Room is a noteworthy step in the evolution of locked room movies. It took the deadly-traps angle of Cube and Saw but put more emphasis on the puzzle-solving aspect that would later make escape rooms so popular.

Fermat's Room

NR

Mystery

Thriller

Release Date

October 7, 2007

Director

Luis Piedrahita

Cast

Lluís Homar , Santi Millán , Alejo Sauras , Federico Luppi , Elena Ballesteros , Helena Carrión , Núria Badia , Mar del Hoyo , Ariadna Cabrol , San Yélamos , Alicia Fernández , Josep Minguell , Juanma Falcón , Víctor Benjumea

Runtime

88 minutes