When Orna (Julia Rhodes), an aspiring screenwriter, and her boyfriend Jack (Mark Knightley) move into a house together on the southern coast of England, things seem idyllic at first. But the appearance of a strange woman named Maresa (Stamatina Papamichali) threatens to ruin their relationship.
Jack
seems increasingly obsessed with Maresa, often kissing her
in front of Orna. And even though Orna is angered by her
boyfriend's obvious unfaithfulness, she herself feels drawn
to this mysterious woman. Strange things continue to happen,
yet Orna seems to be the only one who is aware of them';
she hears unexplained noises, has vivid and disturbing dreams,
and wonders if she may be unable to distinguish between
her imagination and reality.
Content
This
is a very interesting story; not only does it include the
natural fear of death and particularly of people coming
back from it, but also the fear that exists among many artistic
people- that of becoming so immersed in the creative process
that they are unable to distinguish between the fantasy
world and the real world. With these rather eerie themes,
this film seems to be aspiring to the sort of psychological
thriller made popular by both Alfred Hitchcock and -more
recently- M. Night Shyamalan. With this type of a story,
there is definite potential for a very interesting and intense
movie.
That
being said, however, this film's biggest problem lies in
the fact that, although this could be a very interesting
movie, it just wasn't put together very well. In these types
of films, the drama comes not from scaring the audience
to death in the conventional horror movie way, but from
the dragging out and building up the tension for as long
as possible before hitting them with a stunning conclusion.
In Hitchcock's Rope, for instance, the audience knows
that there is a body inside a particular piece of furniture,
and that the killers are using that chest as a table for
the dinner party that will host the dead man's parents and
fiancé. Hitchcock included this chest in nearly every
shot of the film, and built up the tension by including
moments where the body was almost discovered or simply by
the chest's proximity to the dead man's unsuspecting family.
In a rather different vein, Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense
built up tension in an entirely different way, by scaring
the audience with each successive dead person that appeared,
before finally revealing the true secret in the end –
the that child psychologist we thought was helping the boy
was in fact himself deceased. At that point, all the subtle
hints throughout the film – such as the basement door
that always seemed stuck – suddenly made sense.
This
kind of tension buildup is crucial for a movie in this genre,
and unfortunately there isn't much in Dead Time.
The opening sequence is interesting -with photographs of
a beautiful woman and a dead body- and this is initially
enough to hold the audiences interest. Also, because of
the nature of the genre an audience is usually willing to
accept all the little things that don't quite make sense.
But this story continues to drag on for quite a long time,
and continues to not make sense, that the audience will
eventually get bored with it and not really care what was
happening at the beginning anyway. In addition, I was pretty
much able to guess who Maresa was fairly early on in the
movie, something that I wouldn't think one would want the
audience to know, as it takes away nearly all of the tension.
