Gateway

The acting is great and the cinematography is great. The plot is incredibly boring and hard to make sense of. I am not even sure I would classify this as horror, maybe more like a psychological drama. Slow burn is one thing but geez.

This has got to be one of the most boring movies i have ever watched. Literally, NOTHING happens. It's just talk, talk, talk...then minute-long shots of the faces of the actors brooding. There was one scene of a man staring at the camera with his mouth open. Then he talks around the house till he sees two other men taking drugs in slow motion. That went on for a solid 3 minutes. What the point of that scene was not even the director knows. Just an awful movie. This isn't horror. The only scary thing about this movie is the idea of having to sit through it again. You might be thinking, was there anything redeeming about this movie? Sure. It was filmed really well. But that's it.

The thing that stands out most about this film is the horrible sound quality throughout.

Most times the sound design ignores important details about what is going on during a seen, but somehow manages to focus on unimportant things and add distracting, poorly recording sound effects to draw attention to them.

In almost every scene I could point out an example, it is a persistant problem that by the end of the film goes beyond distraction and becomes extremely annoying.

One example is a scene where they are sitting next to a wooded area on a sunny day. There is no background noise, nothing to go along with what is on the screen, just silence. Could this be a thematic design choice? No not really, in the next scene near the same location during a phone call, they add sounds you might expect like birds and light wind. However, the mix is bad even on those sounds and they just seem odd.

All in all the sound imo is the worst aspect of this film, it is just always bad. In many scenes the effects they use are extremely bright and sibilant, which is always annoying when sound production teams give no attention to this all too common problem. If you use cheap, generic microphones, take time to educate yourself on production techniques you can use to alleviate that weakness.

Ok rant about horrible sound is over, how about the rest of the film? Well, visually it is ok I guess? But to be honest it just has a really boring look to it most of the time. So while I might say the cinematography is competent (especially when compared to the sound design which is abysmal and I wouldn't even say amateurish), it is in no way compelling.

If you don't like the boring look, well don't hold out hope for the story or performances. Everything about the movie's story is just boring. The presentation is done in a way that it almost feels like the filmmakers want you to be bored.

If you like boring movies, give it a try I guess. If you dislike poorly done, sibilant sounds, skip this 100%. If you can literally think of just about any other way to spend your day, do that instead. IMO watching this movie is probably about as entertaining as reading this inexplicably long review.

I'm a huge fan of the "How the f&*% did we get here" kind of films, and the synopsis really felt like it was going to be in that style.

Unfortunately, about 85% of the movie is just nothing. A bunch of hoodlums doing hoodlum stuff, milling about, doing nothing, etc...

I was so bored to absolute tears that I'm pretty sure my brain just turned off until the monotony of the banal hoodlum slice of life portion of the film was over that I barely knew what was even going on.

I will say the acting was passable, everyone did really well, but you can only do so much with writing that consists of "Do hoodlum things like walk around and do nothing for 85% of the film."

The lo/no budget film is a business card for the director, if you scour youtube, you can find the early work of Shane Meadows and it was clear to anyone watching those one location, no budget short films that this director should be given the means to expand his stories, so rich are the characters and narrative.

Gateway could just as easily be so considered, this is the tale of a crew of petty criminals looking to break into the big time but choosing the wrong house for their plan, the characters are well fleshed out and dialogue sounds authentic coming from the individual players in the story. If I could point out just one thing for any future work, and this is completely subjective, something I wondered about while watching, would be the blocking, I felt that such an intricate meshing of two storylines would have been much more dynamic if the characters moved about a bit more during dialogue scenes, but as I say, completely subjective, they may have been static to add to the sense of powerlessness that they gang were experiencing as they struggled to get a grip on the supernatural happenings in their hiding place.

The intensity was extremely well executed, there is a very effective, surreal sequence where the main protagonist is unable to move as he witnesses his own history playing out in front of him, it really hit the mark, anyone who has considered their own historic deeds or words will identify with the scene.

Overall the film was engaging, believable dialogue, I'd love to see what Niall Owens could do if freed from the restraints of a limited budget, I'd say, watch this space.