Rating: C+
Dir: Joshua Sowden
Star: Brant Rotnem, Craig Gellis, Brock Jones, Cherie Corinne Rice
Anyone remember COVID-19? Five years ago, it was just another over-hyped disease out of Asia. Seems a lot longer ago somehow. It’s a significant factor in this film, with people wearing masks and muttering about “six feet”, which dates it in the same way as flappers jitterbugging to celebrate the end of prohibition. Someday this movie will need to be shown to my grandkids, as an example of what lock-down cinema was like: a handful of cast members, very obviously not getting too close to each other, in a limited location. Helps keeps things cheap though: the IMDb estimates the budget was $3,500. Mostly spent on hand sanitizer and supplies for baking bread, I guess.
Into the pandemic comes Trevor Wilkinson (Rotnem), who has just taken over as property manager for a block of apartments. It’s not long before he is butting heads with the abrasive maintenance man, Jerry (Gellis), and meeting tenants Bobby (Jones) and Jasmine (Rice). However, Trevor gradually comes to believe that not everything is quite right in the building, with a series of tenants – and even his predecessor in the manager position – having suddenly vanished from the complex. Jerry isn’t concerned, stating people leave all the time. But the more Trevor digs up, the more he comes to the inexorable conclusion there’s something sinister going on. Maybe it’s connected to Jerry’s warnings to Trevor, about not going into the maintenance room in the basement?
Certainly, this is one of those cases where Jerry is either an extremely obvious villain, or an extremely obvious red herring. I won’t say which. Either way, settle in, and get ready to watch Trevor slowly walking round a remarkably dimly-lit building. However, this ends up being more effective than it sounds, with some nicely done, almost monochrome photography. The lack of characters works for the film too, providing a sense of near-Gothic isolation. Could probably have used Jasmine flitting along corridors, holding a candelabra there. After initially seeming likely there’s a natural (or, at least, psychotic) explanation for the disappearances, things take a sharp turn for the weird in the last fifteen minutes. It’s here the film is likely at its best, and I wish it had taken this direction earlier.
For in this final chunk, various elements snap together, such as Trevor’s relationships with his mother and father – strained and non-existent, respectively. I thought the latter was going to play a particular pivotal role, before the movie swerved in another direction. It does feel somewhat rushed, perhaps as a result of being so back-loaded, compared to the first hour and a quarter where… not much actually happens. Hey, what do you expect, on a budget that probably would barely cover a month’s rent in Los Angeles? As COVID cinema though, it works reasonably well given the clear restrictions, and provides a glimpse into a time where the end of the world seemed, if not nigh, then at least nigh-ish.