Reviews: Iron Doors

Text © Richard Gary / Indie Horror Films Blog, 2013
Images from the Internet

                            

Iron Doors

Directed by Stephen Manuel
MVD Visual
Jingai
80 minutes, 2010 / 2013
www.MVDvisual.com

This film has won numerous awards in the festival circuit, including best picture, best actor and best cinematography. It left me with more questions than answers.

Before you read further, know that the whole film is available for free, linked below the trailer at the bottom of this review. While I won’t give away any endings or major plot secrets, there will be minor spoiler alerts throughout. Okay? Then let’s continue.

 

An unnamed investment banker, played at full emotion by German actor Axel Wedekind, wakes up in a locked vault with nothing but a dead, maggoty rat, and a locked locker that looks like it could have come from any gym or high school. At first he thinks someone is playing a practical joke, but comes to realize that there is more going on than that. What he faces is, well, survival.

In a way I won’t divulge, he pairs up with the only other person in the story, an unnamed African woman (Rungano Nyoni, who also writes and directs films) who disappeared from her own country, waking up inside a coffin for some reason. So, the two of them have to figure out the puzzle together.

This is obviously some kind of game. In fact, this film is curiously like two others, one being Saw (2004), and the other is the way underrated Cube (1997), but without the gore, though with a few disturbing scenes.

As these two struggle to find a way out, themselves and unbelievably, each other (a sex scene, after 4 days of no food, really?), the thought occurred to me, I don’t care. There is no context for the two of them, their lives before, or anything else. Surely, that is the reason, because the story wants you to see them from scratch, I get that. It’s also why I am so ambivalent. He basically rants and raves a lot, with enough “fucks” thrown in to make David Mamet happy. She just goes from scared to totally calm pretty damn fast.

More than once – make that often – I was tempted to reach for the fast forward. That I didn’t is amazing. It’s not because I couldn’t stand the apprehension, but rather it was more of “get on with it already.” Supposedly there is a claustrophobic element because they’re locked in a vault for the whole time, but I felt much more of that in the first Saw and Cube than here.

While I liked her more than him, her expectation of him as a man to take care of her (no, you chisel, I’m too delicate and precious for that) irked the crap outta me, quite honestly. In Africa, a place of every-day desperation and a high death rate, I cannot believe she wouldn’t just swing that hammer like John Henry, rather than the light tap-tap-tap. This was obviously written and directed by a man, steeped in masculinist beliefs, who has no concept of what women are capable of doing.

And this may be picky, but we see that they pee, but don’t they have to take a dump, at some point, as well? I mean, I don’t need to see it, but if you’re gonna indicate bodily elimination, some discussion may be necessary in that department as well, especially since there are two strangers sharing this space.

As for the conclusion, well, hunh?

This would have been a good chance for a commentary track, but the only extra is the trailer.  The original film was in 3D, which seems odd to me, in the same way some radio news stations (e.g., New York’s excellent 1010WINS) brag about the channel being in both stereo and HD. It’s just talk, so why bother? The DVD (at least my version) is straight 2D, but my opinion would not change if it were one more dimension.