Sundance: Right at Your Door
Monday evening, January 23, 2006. Ok, speaking of personal identification…it doesn’t get much closer than this one. This one hit home. Literally. Set in or near my LA neighborhood of Silver Lake, this film is about a husband and wife who live through a bio-terrorist attack on LA that occurs one morning while the wife is driving to work. And the first 25 minutes of the film, while the attack is unfolding, is one of the tensest 25 minutes of film I’ve watched. I’m sure that the scenes of downtown LA in flames with poisonous gasses overhead caused me more horror than they would most, since the shots look like they could have been taken from the vantage point over downtown LA that exists about 30 feet from my front door. These shots helped the film take home some hardware, winning the Excellence in Cinematography award in the dramatic competition category. The film tried to take a different angle than 28 Days Later or other films about terrorism. Rather than focus on the literal terror, it nobly attempted to focus on the trivialities of interpersonal relationships and how a terrorist attack does not interrupt the bickering and selfishness that are unfortunately a part of even the most healthy of relationships. Unfortunately, this angle just didn’t quite work…and instead left me not really identifying with either of the characters.
