escapegoat

Adventure/Thriller - What if the world's greatest escape artist met inescapable circumstances? During a farewell performance before the Old World Theater closes for reconstruction, world-famous but frequently cruel illusionist Felix Fleming survives in a water tank while his entire audience is killed by accidental pyrotechnic failures. Aware he’s easily capable of escaping custody, authorities send the magician to a military outpost in the middle of the Sahara. When his convoy is attacked by Tuareg smugglers, a drone airstrike takes out everyone but Felix, stranding him there. Wandering the desert in search of rescue, death approaches as he confronts his dark past for the first time and decides to reject his own name for having abandoned his mother. He finally collapses to the unusual sight of a beautiful woman, Chantelle, in the distance. She comes to his aid until gunfire from two patrolling guards scares her off. They find the escape artist and take him to recover at a mysterious secret oasis known as Zerzura. Modern, luxurious, and strikingly vacant, Zerzura is controlled by a brash sultan who fears the lost soldier’s arrival and locks him away in a dungeon. There, he meets Azazel, a kindly older prisoner who lived in the oasis before the sultan took over and enslaved the peaceful Zerzurans to a crude gold mining operation. Worse, Azazel tells him their remote location precludes any hope of escape. Felix breaks out of the dungeon to search for the woman who saved him, with a promise to return for Azazel. Locating her deep in the oasis wilds, Felix learns she once worked for the sultan, recruiting people from around the world to live “off-grid” at the oasis—unwittingly consigning them to the sultan’s clutches—until he scapegoated her in a false promise to the new miners. With his callous exterior rapidly disappearing under the circumstances, Felix helps Chantelle dismantle the sultan and his mining operation, only to discover Azazel was the true sultan all along and his men have the oasis surrounded. He brutally kills Chantelle and maims Felix before welding him into a doorless cage and blaming him for the backbreaking reconstruction work the miners must endure. Here in this cell, suffering their jeers, Felix finally accepts responsibility for his blame-casting behavior and is resurrected—back in the theater he never left, the entire experience revealed as a fainting dream inside an elaborate illusion from which he emerges anew, changed, and begging forgiveness from his staff, all of whom—we’re amazed to discover—have appeared as characters in Zerzura, avatars of his guilty conscience. Will they forgive him after years of torment? Perhaps. In the meantime, Felix departs the theater to search for his long lost mother.