Right At Your Door

Right At Your Door opens on a day like any other day in Los Angeles. Brad (Rory Cochrane) makes his coffee. His wife Lexi (Mary McCormack) heads off to work. Then news arrives of multiple explosions in the area and subsequently of the dangerous toxins released by these attacks. What the film gets right above all things is the mania of a major crisis and the many instances of miscommunication that follow. People listen closely to the news on their radio, resorting to the car stereo when power dies out. They try to phone 911 unsuccessfully. These little details of the initial response to the attack make for an unnerving parallel to the aftermath of several recent American tragedies. Then the movie transforms from a note perfect first response thriller into something of a moral drama about Brad’s choices given his wife’s exposure to whatever chemical weapons went off in the area. He has sealed himself into his home (as suggested on his radio) and she is stuck outside, “contaminated.”

There is something innately gut wrenching about their circumstance, but the way their story gets stretched out to nearly an hour’s long wait for some kind of resolution makes it an ultimately more taxing film than a suspenseful one. Once the initial, edge-of-your-seat crisis revelation has passed the film morphs into a talkie with a toxic twist. Brad sits inside the house and consoles his wife just outside his door in what seem to be her final days. It’s an interesting idea, in theory, but despite strong performances from the actors, the characters are a bit too banal to sustain an hour’s worth of casual conversation. And beyond a few good “what’s out there in the bushes?“ scares, that’s really all the film amounts to in the end. The tension breaks just as it should be revving up. Yet strangely it all builds up to an out of place twist ending that’s surprising yet highly unsatisfying. It arrives like an unwanted jolt of electricity just as the film has reached its soft lull of a character climax. While the tragedy of the main characters’ emotional dilemma is quietly and quite beautifully resolved, another more perilous dilemma emerges to tear them from their newly found acceptance of their situation. Whether you see it as a welcome shock or an over the top contrivance for last minute thrills is most likely a matter of personal taste, but it’s a clear reversal of pace for a film better served by subtle chills.

More than most of the moments intended to scare and thrill the audience work and quite a lot of the character dialogue does as well. It’s simply too long a film and too intellectually vacant to really matter with regard to a subject this severe. There are some emotional questions raised about how one would deal with their friends and family in such a time of danger, but save for a viciously heavy-handed indictment of American crisis response tactics, there’s not much real social or political potency. What works here is the inescapably compelling crisis at hand and the “what would you do?” implications of each and every life or death decision a character makes. It puts a very realistic spin on the disaster thriller and that’s a welcome innovation. So, despite some slow moments and a rather warped and unpleasant ending, it’s still intriguing and relatable enough to make it mildly worth seeing.

Grade: B-