Six strangers wake in a room; a man who knows everything about them appears on the monitors above… Nature may abhor a vacuum as much as Jigsaw hates anybody who doesn’t appreciate the gift of life… But even with Saw awaiting a reoiled reboot at Blumhouse, it’s hard to take to this grifting throwback. Labyrinth doesn’t aim to kick off a new torture franchise with the ingenuity of 2004’s Saw, but it sure does feel like a rushed and bloated attempt to jump straight into Saw II.
Bloat is the word, alright: Labyrinth kicks off with a quote from Dante Alighieri (“Do not be afraid. Our fate cannot be taken from us. It is a gift”), before piling through supernatural invocations, Christian lore, and then, after a drawn-out sequence rounding up its players, a few torture traps. A lot is going on, a lot of the wrong kind of stuff, and the ropey set of rooms of clear plastic tables and nail-popping catwalks doesn’t seem big enough to hold it. Especially given the sketchy characters we’re stuck with for an hour and a half.
Brought together by the enigmatic if dapper mastermind (Tommy Flanagan), is a small-town drug dealer (David Sakurai), a loving dad with a shady past (Mekhi Phifer), a police officer (Alexxis Lemire), an obnoxious financier (Chris Klein), a notorious celebrity shooter of a home invader (Shane West), and a young girl apparently too concerned about the state of the world to have done anything wrong (Ami Park).
Of course, each has something to hide, and Flanagan’s overlord is here to draw it out. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the actors working through a stodgy morality tale that might see them holding a revolver to their neck, impaling themselves or being crucified (oddly, by hammered screws) at any given moment. But with the one constant being the bickering and endless repetition of their names, the actors’ approaches to their roles vary considerably in tone.
Some of the players fare better than others. Lemire at least warms up with the most screen time, while there’s not a second that Phifer doesn’t feel wholly wasted. On the other side of the table, Klein chews the scenery so much it’s a wonder he doesn’t accidentally eat one of his fellow captives.
Pulling the strings, it’s great to see Flanagan taking on this kind of menacing role. Having established himself with memorable cameos in the likes of Braveheart and Gladiator before taking notable roles in high-profile series, he wraps his Glaswegian vowels around an untouchable villain with relish. But similar films have been shyer about keeping their villain hidden for a reason. Flanagan’s mysterious, smoking jacket-clad arbiter overshadows his victims in almost every scene. At the FrightFest UK premiere, there were palpable laughs when he appeared as a hologram. Appeared… And hung around.
That’s one of the distractingly shoddy effects in a remarkably unpolished film. It’s almost like the crew’s attention wanders off for lengths of time. In a film of many hectic shots, with Flanagan’s orchestrator appearing on multiple screens over shiny surfaces, the spill of overlays, especially static, onto the rest of the picture is unmistakable.
The traps could save things; there are always the traps! But this isn’t a film that’s going to inspire a ranking of best torture devices any time soon. The highlight, and most extended, is a wholly unimaginative game of Russian roulette. The few ‘games’ we get just feel like means to an end, and unfortunately the central crux isn’t all that interesting either.
Far from covering things up, the hecticness of Labyrinth just highlights how convoluted, clumsy and illogical this take on fusing splatter, torture porn, and psychological thriller is. Worse, there’s barely a labyrinth for it to unravel in (although singing goblins would have cheered things up no end).
It’s utterly inexplicable from Ryūhei Kitamura, a director with such a solid background in horror and the wholly more impressive Midnight Meat Train and No One Lives under his belt. A bad day at every character’s office, the few casting high points aren’t enough to solve this very patchy riddle.
Labyrinth received its UK premiere at FrightFest 2026 on Saturday, August 29
