Blank

There is one idea in the movie and it is stretched out for up to an hour too long. WE get it she can't get the door open. Oh no!!! Now lets keep hammering this same idea till the audience is sick of the sight of this movie. And where is tech support or some sort of manager of these units we're staying in? Ludicrous nonsense is what it is. The author writes the story of herself as a girl trapped in a house with her mother who is blind. Oh no, she's trapped in a house again, how dramatic this must be for her. We simply must keep watching this play out in parallel. It just goes on and on and on and on...

Right, well the concept of this 2022 sci-fi thriller definitely sounded interesting enough to make me opt to sit down and watch what writer Stephen Herman and director Natalie Kennedy had to offer.

Sure, I hadn't even heard about "Blank" prior to sitting down to watch it. So I didn't know what I was in for here, aside from what I had read from the movie's synopsis.

Let me just be the first to say that "Blank" is a slow paced and monotonous movie. While the concept idea behind the storyline definitely had potential and sounded interesting enough, then the movie itself was just a bland experience. Nay, a blank experience, get it? The storyline was too slow paced and mundane to provide me with much of any entertainment.

So it was good, at least, that the acting performances by Rachel Shelley (playing Clair Rivers) and Heida Reed (playing Rita) were good enough to make the movie somewhat semi-bearable to sit through. And I did manage to sit through the movie to the end, but I wasn't impressed, nor was I particularly entertained.

For a thriller, then "Blank" was devoid of anything overly interesting, exciting or thrilling. So it was a rather bland movie experience. And if you sit down to watch "Blank" with the hopes and intentions of being in for a thrill ride, then you'll be sorely disappointed.

While I managed to endure this movie to the end, I can honestly say that I am never returning to watch it a second time.

My rating of "Blank" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

We've seen it all before. The AI traps a woman in the house thing. We saw it in The Demon Seed and Vau and a few others as well. In this version of that story they intertwine it with a story of maternal abuse and imprisonment of the the protagonist in childhood.

It's an OK film, but that's all. The acting and production values are ok but the action feels padded out and I got rather bored about halfway through.

Maybe with a bigger budget and better directing talent it could have been something instead of the bloated short story it is.

Stop reading now. Ian padding this review out because I have to write six hundred words.

Claire has writer's block, is facing a deadline from the publisher, and can't finish. She decides to go to a retreat to finish her book. It is totally run by AI. Henry is her concierge, and Rita (android) is her personal servant. Everything is stocked in the way of food and wine as she requested, and the stay is for 30 days. Henry is a hologram. Then a glitch happens, and she is trapped in the unit. There are flashbacks, and she had a terrible childhood. Her mother considered herself a writer, but couldn't get any place to accept her stories. And she was locked in the house. That is the parallel, and the only way she can get out of the unit is to complete her book, and the AI decides if the book is finished, so tricks are not working. Might make a good 30 minute episode but not a full length movie.

A good engrossing film spoiled by incomplete end. Although it becomes repetitive, the viewer is hooked to it just to see how it ends.

And that is it - The end never happens. The story suddenly ends leaving viewers with no answers at all for dozens of questions that are relevant and obvious for any film - How can an AI operated center stop working, and no one attends to it for one month or even more? What had happened if Claire didn't finish the story - would supplies have all been consumed and she die starving? There is bound to be some human supervisor somewhere keeping tabs on how long the supplies are going to lost and he/ she should have been worried about occupied rooms and should have come enquiring. Whether the novel get published? How was it received by readers? Did she publish it under her mother's name to make amends?

Actually, I had thought that the entire Rita's "I cannot open the door till the story is finished" thing is actually the center's method to force Claire to write up the story, to bring anxiety to her, to bring depression to her, so that she is forced to overcome her writer's block. But that was not so. The film just ended.