Gateway

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 industrial products of Western cinema do not distance enough from bad movies made in Los Angeles and copy their manias, even though they tell stories that are not only unusual, but better than all the horror clunkers produced in California. Apart from my usual complaint about the abusive use of sound effects and music, «Gateway» is a good first horror feature by Irishman Niall Owens, with a very strange and ingenious premise: a group of marijuana suppliers (who bear little resemblance to marijuana growers who consume it at the same time) is looking for a safe place where they can sow, care for and harvest the "holy weed".

However, each one has a tragedy behind that is a load too heavy for them to carry. They are typical characters of the marijuana subculture and (disorganized) crime, immersed in an unhappy intrigue that contains some elements that we already know from other horror movies: settling of scores inside a haunted house, where creditors of life, ghosts in search of vindication and pale entities that control the space manifest themselves and interact with the living with dire consequences.

Everything comes to a fair and consistent end, thanks to the images created by Owens and his cinematographer Ger Murphy, which are sinister enough to unsettle us, even though it all happens in a day in broad daylight: the house is sunny, and the exteriors are bright. However, the filmmakers were not confident enough to minimize the manipulative sound and omnipresent musical score. This said aside, it is a highly recommended film, especially for those who like the genre... with a twist.

This type of the haunted house is gonna git ya story has been done so often, it's almost impossible to recall how many times I've seen it, here just given a miserable, suburban council house retread.

Assured cinematography & decent performances can't mitigate the terrible decision to make this a total misery-fest, with a cast of entirely unsympathetic characters & a sound track which would drive the most mentally sound to consider topping themselves.

The few horror elements that there were, missed the usual tricks to make the audience jump, this may have been the intention, to avoid overused tropes, but they were genuinely needed here, to help the viewer along. The gateway of the title, does indeed appear & does offer some intrigue, what, why, how etc, but it all comes to nought & we're left with no answers, thanks movie!

The fault here lies with the writer & director, single-mindedly making what they want, regardless of how this won't entertain the audience, you can make a dark, torturous ride, but you have to take the paying customer with you.

Slow as molasses tale of a gang who decide to take over an abandoned house to grow weed in. In an upstairs bedroom is a gateway to...somewhere hellish. There's too much build-up that doesn't do anything to heighten the experience; we don't know them any better, the better to care about what happens to them. Then there's too much silent watching. The mood is dark and dreadful, but that's not enough. It feels more like a crime saga, but still, one I don't care too much about.

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.