3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Doors

2021, Saman Kesh, Jeff Desom, Dugan O'Neal - Amazon

This indie scifi movie is broken into four segments, directed by the above, respectively, "Knockers / Interstitials", "Lockdown" and "Lamaj".

The premise is fascinating. Simultaneously, world wide, a series of black obelisks appear. They emanate sounds, whisper to some people to enter through their reverberating surfaces. The world is terrified, confused and curious.

The segments introduce the doors and the world's reactions to them. In "Lockdown", a handful of high school students doing a makeup exam are left alone in a school as the "doors" appear for the first time. It sits in the exit hallway and beckons to one of the kids. It is menacing and untrustworthy in its suggestions. Then comes "Knockers" with a later reaction from the world, as teams of "knockers" (knocking on the doors, get it?) are sent through the doors. They are on timed missions, as going past the allotted period leads to psychosis and death. I guess that means you can exit? Then we have "Lamaj" where Jamal (see the backwards title?) hides his door from the world so he can study it, learning how to communicate with it, learning that we are in turn being studied. And finally, "Interstitials" gives us a video recording of someone being affected by a door, but with no door in sight -- their influence is expanding.

This one sat in my hopper for a while. I recall hearing good things about it when it came out a few years ago, but as is usual with me, I saw on it. Any of my influential sources have been forgotten and all I am left with is my impression, which is no surprised - meh. Its not hard to see the thread of what they were going for, especially since the entire "movie" is a shared creative experience, but the only successful thing they communicated was that the doors were weird and scary. And you get that from trailers. A successful scifi mystery needs to go beyond the premise and execute... something. 

Think Interstellar with its revelation that the mission was partially a sham, and the rest of the movie was emotional recovery from that. Think Arrival where not only is a unique form of language & communication discovered, but we learn the aliens are outside normal time-frames. This movie presented the idea that the "doors" are here mysteriously, and in one segment, that they are sent by someone to study us, but the rest is just weird disturbances for the fun visuals. From the art of film making, you can focus on getting good performances (they are all decent here) and producing compelling visuals (honestly, I am bored with the Twin Peaks shortcut to "weird" being compelling) but it all needs an actual story to tie it together. This movie is an idea, an execution of elevator pitches, and that is pretty much it.