Escape from Tomorrow 2013

As the clock strikes the final hours of their Walt Disney World getaway, blue-collar worker Jim White’s (name) world is turned upside down when his boss delivers the crushing news of his termination over the phone at the Contemporary Resort Hotel. With stoic resolve, Jim keeps the devastating revelation to himself, refusing to sully the remainder of his family’s vacation.

As they depart their hotel room and board the monorail, Jim’s eyes lock onto two enigmatic French teenagers, Isabelle and Sophie, who capture his attention without his wife Emily or their children Elliot and Sara noticing. The family’s carefree jaunt through the park is juxtaposed with Jim’s growing unease as he experiences a series of disorienting and unsettling hallucinations. Animatronic characters morph into grotesque visages, while his loved ones’ words become laced with venomous intent.

The tension simmers beneath the surface until an argument erupts between Jim and Emily, prompting him to take their children on a solo adventure through the Disney park, all while pursuing Isabelle and Sophie. It is during this time that Jim encounters a mysterious woman who mesmerizes him with her necklace, leaving him dazed and vulnerable to her advances. As he stirs back to consciousness, she reveals a shocking truth: the seemingly innocuous costumed princesses are actually part of a clandestine prostitution ring catering to wealthy Asian businessmen, while the iconic turkey legs sold throughout the park are, in reality, emu meat.

Jim’s attempts to connect with Isabelle and Sophie are met with scrutiny by Emily, further straining their relationship. As they venture deeper into Epcot, the atmosphere grows more charged. After an altercation between Jim and his wife results in a slap, Sara’s disappearance sends him frantically scouring the park until the security guards intervene, using a taser to render him unconscious.

As Jim regains consciousness in the enigmatic detention facility beneath Epcot’s iconic Spaceship Earth, he’s met with a jarring montage of images: photographs of a mysterious woman whose visage had haunted his imagination during the Soarin’ ride, and video feeds depicting pivotal moments from his past. A scientist, whose artificial nature is later revealed, delves into Jim’s flights of fantasy, unraveling the sinister experiment orchestrated by the Siemens Corporation since Jim’s earliest visits to the theme park with his father. The revelation that Jim’s own boss was complicit in the conspiracy and his termination a deliberate ploy to facilitate the closure of the Buzz Lightyear ride, just as he and Elliot were mere steps away from boarding, serves only to deepen the sense of betrayal. Moreover, the scientist discloses that Jim had betrayed Elliot, mirroring the treachery perpetrated by Jim’s father against him in his own childhood.

With a mixture of defiance and desperation, Jim responds by damaging the instrument panel with medical ointment and dispatching the android scientist with a brutal decapitation. He then makes a daring escape through the sewer system, only to find Sara imprisoned by the enigmatic woman now masquerading as Snow White. As she recounts her tragic past as a costumed princess, Jim is initially entranced by the hypnotic power of the necklace, but Sara’s timely intervention and destruction of the artifact shatter the spell, allowing them to make their escape.

Back in his hotel room, Jim’s ordeal takes a further turn for the worse as he begins experiencing symptoms reminiscent of cat flu – a condition brought about by Sophie’s unwitting transmission via her unprovoked spitting earlier. As Elliot stirs awake to the sounds emanating from the bathroom, he finds Jim on the brink of mortality and is met with a desperate plea for aid. However, instead of offering succor, Elliot chooses to shut the door, leaving his friend to face his fate alone.

The next day, Emily’s distressed discovery of Jim’s lifeless body serves as a grim harbinger of events yet to come. As the hotel’s cleaning staff arrive to sanitize the scene, they inadvertently implant false memories in Elliot’s mind, replete with fond recollections of a Buzz Lightyear ride he never actually experienced. Meanwhile, as Jim’s corpse is carted away, a new family – comprising an alternate version of Jim, the mysterious woman from the Soarin’ ride, and their daughter – takes up residence in the hotel, casting a shadow over the already surreal landscape.