‘No Exit': How Does the Movie Compare to the Book? — What Is Quinn Reading? (2024)

Pretty much since the moment Taylor Adams’ thrillerNo Exit was published in 2017, I’d heard rave reviews from every corner of the internet. Despite this, I let it languish on my TBR pile for far, far too long, until recently I finally picked it up during Target’s recent buy-2-get-1 sale (doing the Lord’s work there, Tarjay) and had my mind promptly blown by the riveting story of a woman trapped in a rest stop during a blizzard with an unknown kidnapper. (You can read my thorough review here). And, as luck would have it, I discovered that Hulu’s film adaptation of No Exit was actually being released just a week later. The book gods must’ve been looking out for me, y’know?

Since I was — and admittedly still am — obsessed with Adams’ novel, I made sure to find myself glued to my couch on Feb. 25 to see how the movie version treated the source material. And honestly? It . . . well . . . it’s not great, I’ll say that. Is it terrible? No. But does it have a very Made For TV vibe going on? Yes, yes it does.

There are still some batsh*t, blow-your-mind, what-the-F*CK-just-happened crazy moments (obvi) featuring stars Havana Rose Liu, Dennis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, and Danny Ramirez in this thriller. But the pulse-pounding high wire act that Adams miraculously kept from flying off the rails on the page has been stripped of many of the realistic, gut-churning moments of fear and jaw-dropping twists in its journey to the big screen. Womp, womp.

If you’re looking for a deeper look at how the pair differ, keep reading. Just be warned: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW!

What Is ‘No Exit’ About?

If you haven’t read the book, No Exit kicks off with pint-sized, reformed party girl Darby Thorne driving through a treacherous blizzard in the remote mountain roads of Colorado on her way home from art school to see her dying mother. But when the snow finally gets the best of her beat-up Honda, she’s forced to wait out the storm in a remote highway rest stop with a small group of fellow travelers: Lars, Ashley, Ed, and Sandi. With only some poorly-stocked vending machines and stale coffee to keep them company, Darby eventually gets restless of the idle chit-chat and heads out to the parking lot to see if she can get any cell service. That’s when she makes a horrifying discovery: through the window of one of the strangers’ vans, she spots a little girl, bound and gagged inside a dog crate.

Who is she? And how can she save her? While pondering those questions and desperately trying to form a plan, Darby realizes every decision from then on might not only cost the life of the mysterious child held hostage in the van, but also her own. And thus, Adams begins a tense, truly terrifying journey into the mind of an eminently evil, f*cked-up villain and the Final Girl who vows to stop him.

How Does the ‘No Exit’ Movie Adaptation’s Plot Differ From the Book?

Right off the bat I’ll say you can expect far less thrills, chills, and gore from the movie. Taylor Adams’ original story sometimes veers into horror territory thanks to graphic descriptions of murders-via-nail gun and a subplot involving Lars and Ashley’s uncle, Kenny, who runs a sex trafficking ring in the midwest. The nail gun and Uncle Kenny still factor into the film’s plot, but to nowhere near the horrifying degree that they do in the book. To that end, many of the deaths and injuries everyone incurs are also much less disgusting (whether that’s a positive or negative for you, make of it what you will).

There are also a few big changes to the general story. Darby (played by actress Havana Rose Liu) is no longer a Colorado college art student with a troubled past trying to race across the country to visit her mom in the hospital with cancer. Her mom now has a brain injury and Darby isn’t in college but in a California-based rehab as a recovering addict. She breaks out of the facility in spectacular fashion to drive to her mother’s hospital, and that’s how she ends up where she does in the book: stranded at a rest stop in the mountains during a crazy blizzard.

Ed and Sandi’s deaths are different, too. (Ex: Ash simply shoots Ed with a gun instead of first nailing his mouth shut into his skull, and letting him lay slowly, painfully dying for a while, before then shooting him with a gun. What a guy!) And there’s no sequence involving cutting Darby’s fingers off in a door hinge (phew). Instead Ash nails her hand to the wall and her addiction comes into play in how she escapes — she snorts her last bag of cocaine (which she found in the car she escaped rehab in) to give herself the strength to pull the nail out of her hand. (Everyone together now: Y-I-K-E-S.)

How Does the ‘No Exit’ Movie End?

There are a few key differences! After Darby pulls the nail out of her hand and escapes the rest stop with Jay’s help, she has an interaction with Ash that results in him accidentally shooting Lars in the head with his nail gun, killing him. Darby and Jay run outside to make their escape in Darby’s car, not in a large truck or with the help of a passing snowplow driver, as in the book. Ash shoots out her tires with the nail gun and they crash pretty much immediately in the parking lot (lol like girl???) and he lights the rest stop building on fire.

In the meantime, there’s none of the fake-out twist with a cop that Adams has in the novel. Instead it jumps right to when a policeman does arrive at the right location, only to mistake Darby for the killer (to be fair he does roll up and see her shooting Ash, I guess) and shoots her in the shoulder. Ash takes her weapon and kills the cop, but right as he’s about to finish her off, Darby uses a screwdriver to stab his neck, finally killing him.

This is obviously very different from the killer — pun intended — death of Ashley in the book! In the original, he leaves Darby for dead in the parking lot and chases down Jay, who’s taken shelter with a friendly snowplow driver. He incapacitates the driver and tries to kill Jay, only for her to turn the tables on him and blow the bottom half of his face off with a gun.

The final sequence is also switched up. Instead of Jay begging Darby to come escape via snowplow and Darby seemingly dying in the parking lot, only for yet ANOTHER twist in the last few sentences to reveal that she survived after all (she and Jay’s family visit her mother’s grave and find closure), the film sees Darby using the cop’s radio to call for help. Then, in a flash-forward, Darby's estranged sister Devon visits her in rehab.

So, that’s that, fam! Please forgive any errors I might’ve made in little details about the movie above (seeing as I had no less than 25 margaritas once I realized where it was heading…). The acting in the No Exit adaptation isn’t bad whatsoever — I really liked Havana Rose Liu! — but the story didn’t do its source material justice. At all.

But anywho, if you liked No Exit, here are a few other books with a similar vibe that you should check out:

• Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

• One by One by Ruth Ware

• Falling by TJ Newman

• Survive the Night by Riley Sager

• The Guest List by Lucy Foley

And also keep an eye out for the rest of 2022’s book-to-movie adaptations coming out!

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