Escape is one of those films that seems convinced it is saying something very profound all the time. And perhaps that is precisely one of the reasons why it ends up feeling so heavy. It starts from a striking premise: a man wants to go to prison in order to stop making decisions, to escape the world, himself and freedom as a burden. On paper, the idea has strength. The problem is that the film turns it into something too affected, too pleased with its own strangeness and, in the end, quite boring. There is no denying that Rodrigo Cortés has craft. The film is made with intention, style and a clear desire not to be a conventional product. But having personality does not necessarily mean being moving, interesting or effective. Escape wants to be a fable, a satire, an existential drama, an absurd comedy and a political comment, but in many moments it seems more concerned with proving its intelligence than with building a truly living experience. Mario Casas gives himself fully to the role, that is true. His performance has intensity, physical commitment and an unease that fits the character. Anna Castillo also brings truth when she appears, and the cast in general holds the film together better than the script deserves. But not even good actors can save a proposal that becomes increasingly rigid, increasingly discursive and increasingly trapped inside its own mechanism. The biggest problem is that the film does not let the viewer breathe. Everything seems designed to be read as symbol, clever idea or brilliant line. There are dialogues that try to sound ingenious, situations that want to feel wildly free and moments that aim for a very calculated kind of strangeness. But when that construction does not connect emotionally, what remains is a sense of pretension. The film does not feel free: it feels determined to look free. It also feels long. Very long. Not so much because of its running time, but because the premise starts to wear out long before the film ends. What may seem curious at first eventually begins to spin around itself. The story moves forward, but the feeling is one of stagnation. And when a film about someone who wants to escape ends up trapping the viewer inside a repeated idea, something is not working. Escape may have its defenders, and it is easy to understand why some people value its strangeness, its ambition or its distance from more conventional Spanish cinema. But for me it is highly overrated. It did not entertain me, it did not move me and it did not feel as lucid as it seems to think it is. A film can be uncomfortable, absurd or unclassifiable and still work. This one, instead, felt cold, tiring and far too in love with itself.