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Thematically, No Escape is exactly the kind of film one might expect from its makers. Brothers Drew and John Erick Dowdle have a track record of making slick, gut-wrenching horror films about people trapped in nightmare situations. In Quarantine, they quarantined an entire building with super-rabies. In Devil, they stuck some folks in an elevator with the devil. In As Above, So Below, they sent a few adventurers into the cult world of dark catacombs below Paris.

If ‘wretchedly insensitive’ seems too strong a statement, know that critics generally agree.

No Escape, then, makes sense. Set in an unnamed Southeast Asian nation, No Escape is the story of one American family trapped inside a violent political coup. “We didn’t want to make a statement about any one country,” Drew Dowdle told me in an interview. “That seemed like the wrong thing to do.”

I had the chance to sit down with Drew and John Erick recently, to ask them about their movie and the coup it uses for a setting. The film is made with undeniable technical skill: The action is gripping, and the performances by Owen Wilson and Lake Bell (especially) are moving. By most accounts, this is a successful, white-knuckling thriller.

Still, talking to them was a little awkward because there is one major problem: No Escape is wretchedly insensitive. For two hours, audiences watch a white family on the run in a nameless country, fighting to survive a nameless mob of Asians mercilessly trying to slaughter them.

To be fair, there is some pretense for the rebels’ behavior, but what we get comes off as little more than lip service. Hammond, a British ex-pat played by Pierce Brosnan, talks for a minute or two about debt, Western national interests, and the exploitation of water rights, infusing the movie with a political context for the unrelenting violence.

“Hammond tells us the rebels are not wrong. The violence is wrong,” Drew said. “There’s nothing that justifies that kind of violence.” The Dowdles attempted to write in some humanity for their Asian characters. But Hammond’s speech falls far short, given the extreme violence portrayed in the movie.

And if “wretchedly insensitive” seems too strong a statement, know that critics generally agree.

Alonso Duralde, , puts the film in the company of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda work and D.W. Griffith’s klan-hero story, Birth of a Nation. Duralde thinks the film operates with a “queasily racist subtext,” which “surrounds our American protagonists with a bloodthirsty, faceless Yellow Peril.” At , Stephanie Merry calls the film out for “stereotyping an entire region of the world,” by presenting Southeast Asia as “little more than a dangerous hotbed of machete-wielding savages.” Justin Chang, , describes No Escape as a “morally rank slab of cultural exploitation.”

The Dowdles, of course, don’t see it that way. Regarding their decision to set the film during a Southeast Asian coup, John told me about being in one. “It was inspired from that setting,” he said. “My dad and I went to Thailand, and on the day we got there, there was a coup. And I started to think, what if you had little kids with you? What if something really bad happened? That coup was smooth, but what if it wasn’t?”