How do you make a modern day disaster movie? The main rule is play on the public fear and what is more frightening than the current climate of terror? So here we have Right At Your Door. A loving couple (or are they?) living together, working apart, he a struggling musician and she a city girl. It's a simple enough story, she leaves for work while he stays home and someone (for it is never said who) sets off a series of bombs across Los Angeles. Panicky husband try's everything to reach his wife before being told to go home. As more information comes through it turns out they were dirty bombs, toxic and lethal. With the aid of a neighbour's handyman, who has nowhere else to go, they reluctantly seal themselves in the house and wait. Filmed in a low-fi, hand held manner adds to the air of confusion and panic that besets the first half of the film. When his wife arrives back at the house in the now grey covered suburb it turns into a strange love/survival story. He's inside and she's out. What transpires next is a series of teary conversations through glass and plastic and via mobiles that could mirror any frantic calls made on 9/11 or 7/7. The film uses fade to blacks a lot to give the impression of passing time because in the hour and a half we go through three days with the separated couple. Help is seemingly not a lot of help at all and a bizarre twist wraps the whole thing up. One of the films most niggling questions is that of is she having an affair? Her reluctance to have sex with her husband, her throw away comment about ignoring the voice mails she has left on his phone and a random male work college turning up at the house to take her to hospital. None of these are explored or answered in the course of the film. Bleak and punctuated with loose ends the film is an uneasy and fictitious look at something that could all too easily be a reality. It's watchable and interesting if slightly flawed and poses questions of love and morality in an uncertain world. Watch right at your door and pray it never is.
Review of Right at Your Door
