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The Inner Room

Justin here with a look at the locally produced independent psychological thriller, The Inner Room.

I take no pleasure in writing negative reviews. For every movie I write about here at The Movie Advocate there are typically three or four bad ones I've watched. Frankly, I think there is too much negativity when it comes to internet film reviews. I don't need to sharpen my critical knives and eviscerate a movie for the sake of our readers' entertainment or to give myself a sense of superior smugness. I also have a tremendous respect for anyone with the balls to make something creative and put it out in the wild. Making movies is hard work that requires a ridiculous amount of coordination and patience. Like the cliché says, it's easier to destroy than create.

I really wanted to like The Inner Room. It was shot in Fairplay, CO, relatively close to where I live. The production is all local. And aside from those facts, I really like horror movies and psychological thrillers. But unfortunately, The Inner Room has a lot of problems.

Those problems start from the very beginning as a series of what are supposed to be disturbing images flash on the screen in succession. This is supposed to set a tone of uneasiness and show the mental distress that protagonist, Julianne (played by the lovely Jessica Duffy), is experiencing due to the death of her child. Julianne and her husband, Chris are on their way to a work vacation at a luxury cabin in the woods. Chris is a photographer and hopes to capture some shots of the idyllic scenery around them.

The disturbing images I referenced earlier are frustrating because they are extremely generic and – like all of the scary parts of this movie – are accompanied by heavy digital editing and amateurish manipulation. Those tricks took me out of the movie, because frankly they are so silly and familiar that they might as well have used Powerpoint wipes. Thrillers like this rely on the use of a series of powerful images as short hand for what the characters are experiencing. By creating unique images and repeating them at the right times, a director can be highly evocative with a strong economy of time. The problem with the use of images in The Inner Room is that they are about as played out as a killer looking into a broken mirror. An empty swing sways in the breeze, a non-descript dead animal lays on the ground, the eery bathtub scene – it plays like a greatest hits reel of stock horror footage.

Horror movies have a distinct advantage over a lot of other film genres when it comes to shooting on a low budget. Some of my favorite horror movies have virtually no budget, the Val Lewton RKO movies, Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to name a few. Those movies used atmosphere and ambiguity to create the scares. The Inner Room's post production digital manipulation of the “scary parts” felt almost like a laugh track, like the director was telling me, “be scared now.” I didn't really ever feel a sense of danger for Chris or Julianne until the very end of the movie. I didn't buy Julianne's psychosis because it looked like her nightmares were edited with imovie.

The atmospheric parts fell flat for me because after a while the film set into a mundane routine. The movie takes place over several days. Each day, Julianne wakes up, wonders off into the wood, sees something scary, fights with Chris, tries to go to bed, sees something scary, and then we're cut ahead to the next morning. Repeat. I'm OK with slow burns, but this movie takes FOREVER to get going. By the time the movie hits its stride, it's almost over.

Technical issues plague The Inner Room as well. The majority of the movie is shot on a hand held camera. I saw in the credits that there was apparently a steady cam operator, but I don't believe it. The whole movie shakes like Steven Soderburgh after half a dozen Red Bulls. There are also a series of baffling Leone level extreme close ups through the movie. Any scene in a car feels intensely claustrophobic.

There are some good things though. I'm excited to see what director, Jack Gastlebondo's next movie is. This is his first feature length movie and there were no doubt growing pains. Some of his establishing shots were quite good and he did a decent job capturing the action at the end of the movie. The plot did manage to keep me guessing at what was really going on until the end. Sometimes it felt a bit convoluted, but it was a fair trade for the unpredictability. There is one scene involving a doll and a nurse that did manage to creep me out too.

The cut of the movie I watched was dated from mid February. If this movie is still a work in progress, I do think there's still a chance to improve it a great deal simply by editing it differently, cutting about 10 minutes off the run time, streamlining the story, and removing the god-awful digital effects. If those changes were made I think I would like this movie at least a third more than I do in its current state.