Cinequest Film Festival – Safe Space begins with a shot of a couple driving down a desert road. Suddenly, they hit a spike. This is a good indicator that nothing will go as planned and there may be some turmoil within the relationship. The feature is both an examination of relationships, specifically between couples within a larger group of friends, and an out-of-this world commentary on filmmaking and the creative process.

Written and directed by Stefan Kubicki, Safe Space focuses on a few different couples that are part of a larger group of friends that met in graduate film school. They still reunite fairly frequently. There’s Stefan (David Henry Gerson) and Monika (Marta Ojrzynska), Tabitha (Annie Monroe) and Harry (Travis Myers), and Lindsay (Annie Hamilton) and Josema (Josema Roig). The couples have their various problems. For instance, Monika wants a child before she turns 40, but Stefan is reluctant. Tabitha received a job offer in Amsterdam for two years, but she’s unsure if she wants Harry to join her. One of the friends, Shayar (Nardeep Khurmi), clings to the past and plans a one-of-a kind escape room outing with the group, despite their audible groans.

Once the group enters the escape room, located in the middle of nowhere in a California desert, the film gets really, really strange. There’s a chain-smoking alien quick with insults, a talking brain, and a hand in pot of pasta sauce that may or may not be real. In fact, it’s difficult to tell what’s reality and what isn’t, especially since the men took chocolate edibles that Josema picked up at some spiritual retreat, where he met Lindsay. It is entertaining, however, to watch the group enter one room after the other filled with bizarre props. However, the escape room also isolates a few of the group members, including Stefan and Shayar, and the longer the group remains in the game, the more their issues come out.

By the mid-point, Safe Space takes an uncanny and uneven turn and becomes a quasi-commentary on the creative process. In his isolation, Stefan writes a story that plays out like the film. There are even scenes where the other characters stand around, reciting lines as if they’re from the script. In the meantime, he and the other players are tormented by the escape room’s master Popov (Konstantin Lavysh). Oh, and there’s also a cameo by Albert Camus, played by François Guétary, who tells Stefan to imagine Sisyphus happy. All of this becomes a lot, and the film eschews a clear narrative by the halfway point, making it difficult at times to stay engaged.

For the average viewer, this film may be tough to decipher. It feels like it was made by a bunch of graduate film school students, with subtle references and dense commentary on creativity and film. It works best when it focuses on the melodrama between the group of old friends. That conflict, at least, grounds the story in some sense of reality. The escape room concept is clever, especially when used to shine on a light on the relationship woes between the various couples. The rest of the film is a mind-bending trip that tries a little too hard at times.

6.5 Out of 10