Mark Reviews Movies: EXIT PLAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 11, 2020

A superficially ambitious movie, Exit Plan sees the life of a medically doomed man who decides to take his fate into his own hands as an increasingly fractured journey from the ordinary to the enigmatic. Rasmus Birch's screenplay touches upon some compassionate ideas about the purpose of life and some thoughtful ones about the choosing to die. Such mysteries, though, seem like too much for Birch to handle, so his screenplay dismisses them for a more conventional mystery with an incomprehensible resolution.

Max (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a claims adjustor for a life insurance company, has a brain tumor that's growing. It's only a matter of time before the mass affects his physical and mental capacities.

Every time Max tries to tell his wife Lærke (Tuva Novotny), their conversation is interrupted. After a couple of unsuccessful suicide attempts, Max learns that a missing policy holder had visited the Hotel Aurora, which specializes in providing people with a peaceful death. He seeks out their services.

The story isn't quite as straightforward as this, at least from a structural perspective. From the start, which follows Max on his way to the hotel, Birch and director Jonas Alexander Arnby move between the protagonist's time at the hotel, meeting with fellow guests and determining the circumstances of his approaching death, and his time leading up to the decision.

With that back-and-forth comes an odd lack of narrative clarity, because Max's actions before checking in at the Aurora—trying to die—tell us one thing and his actions at the hotel—lazily looking into the behind-the-scenes operation of the place—tell us another. Does he want to die, or is he just investigating an open case for work?

We can accept the apparent contradiction to a certain degree, because both things are possible: Setting himself up for assisted suicide in order to investigate and letting the investigation be his way out of the plan. In his interactions with other guests, we see Max as an empathetic person, listening to and comforting people as they go through their own convictions and doubts about death.

With one unwilling death, though, Birch drops such bigger-picture ideas about our protagonist and the story's difficult themes. The third act of Exit Plan turns into a mystery about a vaguely sinister conspiracy that's quickly established, barely examined, and resolved in a most confounding way.

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