Excellent debut from Chris Gorak, stepping up to write and direct from his previous jobs in production design. It’s therefore no surprise that Right At Your Door is visually impressive, right from the neatly-designed opening titles to the washed-out colours of the dust-covered house. To match this, there’s another terrific score from tomandandy (akaTom Hajdu and Andy Milburn, I hate gimmicky names).

The flashy surface is necessary to distract us from what is basically a stage play (now there’s an idea…), with one location and a cast of 3 – the happy couple and their friendly local handyman, who’s always a useful character to have around when there are windows to be sealed up.

There are a couple of problems with the plot: one, there’s a final twist which feels like it was shoe-horned in there to provide an unnecessary closing shock, and doesn’t really convince on a scientific or logical level. Second, the plot hinges around the fact that the ‘hero’, nicely and scruffily played by Rory Cochrane of CSI Miami fame, refuses to let his wife into the sealed house on her return from work, when everything else in the movie tells us that he would. It’s nice to see Mary McCormack getting a leading movie role at last, and she makes the character attractive and appealing enough to convince us that her husband is a nutter, even when she’s covered in gunk and coughing like Doc Holliday.

Apart from the plot problems, Gorak piles on enough incidental detail, and employs enough hand-held camera, to keep us on edge through the middle period where Brad shuts up shop. (Rather than the compulsory wonky planks of the likes of Night of the Living Dead, the windows are covered in plastic bags fastened to the frames with duct tape. We never discover how the chimney is sealed, or the air-con, and maybe there’s no damp course in LA…)

The other movie brought to mind, as well as numerous episodes of Twilight Zone, is Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile, with its relentless pacing and its discussion of the increased importance of love in times of extreme crisis. It’s not quite as good as that movie, missing out on its streak of absurd humour, but works well as an updated version of a similar story.

Mild Peril Rating:

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