Film Review: Entrance [2012]

 

I think that this film was suggested to me by an acquaintance.
I think we were having a conversation about moody psychological horror films that were a “slow burn”.
The kind of psychological horror film that slowly creeps up on you and before you know it, it’s inside your head, knocking all of your favorite cherished things off of the shelves in your mind.
Unfortunately, this was not one of those films.
Slow, yes. It was quite slow.
For the first two-thirds of the film we follow a plain/pretty twenty-something barista as she walks back and forth from work and goes to sleep and wakes up and feeds her dog and little else.
Yes, I got the sense that she was supposed to be “alienated”. Alone in the city.
Surrounded by people, but unable to establish a deep and meaningful connection with any of them.
I got that.
But I also got bored.
I spent the first two-thirds kind of admiring the sense of “pace” that is rarely seen in contemporary American films and I was, indeed, hoping that it would be a slow-burn.
I was also hoping that this wasn’t the kind of film that had subtle fore-shadowing so you’d feel compelled to watch the film twice to notice the prophetic moments that you didn’t notice the first time through.
Because I truly didn’t want to watch the first two-thirds of this film again.
Thankfully, if it was, I don’t care, because I’m not going to watch this again.
Because at the two-third point, suddenly the film turns into an artless masked killer with an ax movie.
At least it got interesting, but it didn’t make up for the first hour and a half of boring.
The lead gets knocked down, knocked out, and tied and taped and gagged.
Then she spends the last third of the film kind of trying to escape and hide from the masked ax killer.
I think that the first two-thirds of the film were supposed to build a sympathetic interest in the lead actress so that we would be invested in her fate.   But they didn’t and I wasn’t and I didn’t care if she escaped or was given a brand new ax wound as a goodbye gift.
The supporting characters are also a group of those forgettable average low-level hipster-types with half-hearted beards and shaggy haircuts and collared shirts with the collars and cuffs roguishly unbuttoned.   I was also unable to care about what happened to any of these characters who sort of pointlessly drift in and out of the view of the camera saying and doing nothing worth remembering
Perhaps this was an attempt at an existential slasher film.
An exploration of ennui.
If so, the formulaic execution of the final third of the film confounds this intention.
To the films credit, it wasn’t unwatchable. I made it all the way through to the end.
Also the soundtrack was complimentary to the images and the first two-thirds of the film were quite believable.   And boring.
The actors were naturalistic and believable and their performances weren’t overly self-conscious or presentational. But they were still forgettable.
The camera seems to have been operated completely handheld.
If done well, this method can add a believable and naturalistic feel to the composition of scenes and can be quite immersive.   Unfortunately in this film, it was not used successfully, and the camera movement soon becomes a character in itself, making the camera operator a character in the film as they follow the actress at close-range, seeming to improvise every shot, making it up as they go along.
If they had the actress do something other than get ambushed and bound and play hide-and-go-seek for a third of the film it might have made an interesting drama along the lines of Paris, Texas (1984) or Bodies, Rest, and Motion (1993), or Next Stop Wonderland (1998).   But they didn’t and it didn’t.
I checked out the listing on imdb.com and the synopsis is as follows:
“ENTRANCE is about the limits of our perception, how the things lurking on the periphery of our lives can lead to horrific conclusions; about how she fell out of love with the city, but it wouldn't let her go.”
This may have been the intention of the creators, but it certainly was not the end result.
I gave them three stars on imdb.com because I was able to endure the whole thing and they were at least successful in combining sound and moving images to tell a story.
But I wouldn’t want to subject myself to this two-thirds boring / one-third unimaginative contemporary slasher film again.

On the Internet:
IMDB.com: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1918806/