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Right at Your Door

Written by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

The apocalyptic thriller  "Right at Your Door" makes us relive the nightmare of 9/11, keenly evoking the confusion during the terrorist attack. The film eloquently displays how fragile a state we are in.

It opens with a typical sunny morning in the hills of California, as Brad (Rory Cochrane). a scruffy unemployed musician who spends most of his day at home,  sends his button-down wife, Lexi (Mary McCormack) off to downtown L.A. Soon after she leaves, he hears a radio report that a series of explosions have been detonated in the downtown area in the middle of the commuter rush. He frantically hops in the car to track Lexi down, but is stopped by the rapidly spreading chaos.  Police have set up roadblocks due to toxic ash that starts falling from the sky, then the entire city is scrambling for its own safety. As police make him go back, he decides to seal the cracks of the window with duct tapes, with the aid of his neighbor (Tony Perez).

Brad is soon faced with a serious dilemma when a contaminated Lexi shows up at the door. Until this moment, the film offers a promising plot, posing the question to us whether we would let her back into the house or not. It then descends into an endless bickering match that is a little bit too claustrophobic. But Director Chris Gorak captures these still timely moments by intentionally reducing his scenario to an intimate melodrama rather than tackling its political aspects.

With a minimal special-effects budget, he brilliantly achieves the unnerving moment of this "what if?" situation, carefully evading our expectations throughout till the last frame. So vividly has that fateful day of 9/11 been engraved into our memory that this film becomes too close to home for New Yorkers. In the end, we realize that in our lives, twisted information often causes us harm, and that a disaster like 9/11 could indeed be repeated just like 9/11.

Written and directed by Chris Gorak
Director of photography: Tom Richmond
Edited by Jeffrey M. Werner
Music by tomandandy
Production designer: Ramsey Avery
Produced by Palmer West and Jonah Smith
Released by Roadside Attractions.
Running time: 93 minutes.

Cast: Mary McCormack (Lexi)
Rory Cochrane (Brad)
Tony Perez (Alvaro)
Scotty Noyd Jr. (Timmy)
Jon Huertas (Rick),
and Max Kasch (Corporal Marshall).