Name: Breathing Room (2008)
IMDb: link to Breathing Room page
Genres: Horror, mystery, thriller. Country of origin: USA.
Cast: Aisla Marshall (True Blood) as Fourteen, Kim Estes as Ten, Stevens Gaston as Thirteen.
Written and directed by: John Suits and Gabriel Cowen.
The Three Acts:
The initial tableaux: Fourteen people get dumped naked into a locked room that has no windows to the out of doors. The room has a WC and not much else besides a package of clothes with their assigned number on the package. All of them are suffering from short-term memory loss.
Delineation of conflicts:
Their captors leave messages for them, addressed to their respective numbers. After a short time, an unsettled person talks to them through a video screen. They are in a game, and the game has lethal consequences for rules infractions. The winner of the game gets to live.
I think I've seen this before. Right, it's called reality TV, which blights the video landscape. Most reality TV series are elimination derbies, just without people dying.
In terms of film, predecessors include Ten Little Indians (1965) and Cube (1997).
The prisoners try to figure out why each of them is there. They talk to each other about what they do remember of their lives. The lights go out now and then, and usually someone dies in those intervals. This comprises about 70 of the 89 minutes.
Resolution: Watch to the end to get your greatest disappointment.
One line description: Elimination derby plus shaky cam plus reality TV.
Statistics:
Cinematography: 2/10 Indifferent. Doubling the budget, and buying some reasonable video and lighting equipment would have been a good investment. Some of the problems were: soft focus, camera jump, long dark and fuzzy intervals, stupid framing errors, and overexposures.
Sound: 2/10 Often hollow. The incidental music was irritating, but not evocative of fear or dread.
Acting: 2/10 Between bad and who cares.
Screenplay: 0/10 This is the worst part. Who needs motivation? Who needs explanations for physical events in a non-supernatural film? Apparently not these folks. Even if the actors had more skill and training, they would not have been able to overcome this obstacle.
Final Rating: 1/10; two black holes for screenplay and acting.
No comments:
Post a Comment