Right at your Door

This post was pub­lished over 700 days ago and there­fore may not rep­res­ent cur­rent Out­side Con­text think­ing or opin­ion. Please, do not let that detract from your enjoy­ment of it!

Right at your Door has issues.  Of course, being a film with a lim­ited budget, it stays away from effects laden shots and instead focuses in on the two main characters. Married couple Lexi and Brad.  A shame then that it picks char­ac­ters with ZERO in com­mon, who are quite unbe­liev­able as a mar­ried couple.  Some­times films have done this on pur­pose.  Take the bril­liant “The Edge” where Anthony Hop­kins and Elle Macph­er­son are por­trayed as mar­ried. There the ‘anti-chemistry’ sets up the entire plot of the story and that Hopkin’s vic­tori­ous rite of pas­sage for the char­ac­ter.  Here, it becomes a mess.  It is dif­fi­cult to even care about the over­arch­ing ter­ror­ism plot as so little of it is shown to us.  We see no res­ults of the bombs and the cam­era very rarely strays away from Brad.  A device that was sup­posed to increase the sense of isol­a­tion, but actu­ally just make use won­der what the hell is hap­pen­ing else­where?  The essen­tial ques­tion the films asks is “Would you let in your other half when the radio tells you to bar the doors from a virus?  And what are the con­sequences of the action?”

Moreover, sig­ni­fic­ant med­ical plot holes infect this film and there are many MANY strands of story that go nowhere such as the man locked in with Brad that he doesn’t know and the small black kid his wife picks up.  Even worse was the intro­duc­tion of a man, Rick, who seemed to offer some sort of plot twist but just lit­er­ally dis­ap­peared.  The plot instead tries very hard to draw you away from the slightly obvi­ous incid­ent that later decides the end­ing and lays us up for a ham fis­ted and decidedly cruel twist. 

This end­ing left me cold.  As by avoid­ing the char­ac­ters from learn­ing any­thing in the entire movie the film only man­ages to hor­rify you by show­ing you the bru­tal neces­sity of the sur­vival of the many against the lives of the few.  For me to be engaged (and it isn’t hard) char­ac­ters must show that they care in ways other than just scream­ing.  Per­haps les­sons from Tarant­ino (Reser­voir Dogs) are in order? 

One big pile of fail. This film scores a mediocre 6.

Related Posts

• No Related Posts