Walled In (3 Stars)

I'm not actually doing the Halloween horror challenge this year. I haven't promised to watch a horror film every day this month, but I am watching more horror films than usual. After all, October is the month of horror. Today I picked this low budget horror film. Maybe it's a medium budget? It cost $8 million dollars to make. I don't know where the border lies. It was intended for cinema release, but the distributors feared a loss and sent it straight to video.

It's a bizarre story. I'm not referring to the horror aspects. The plot itself is bizarre.

A world famous architect, Joseph Malestrazza, built an apartment building with 120 apartments next to a lake in the middle of nowhere. Obviously it wasn't too far to reach the next town by car, because there were no shortage of tenants. In 1993 there were a series of missing people. When they were finally found it was horrific. 16 people, men, women and children, were sealed in small compartments in the building, which were then filled with liquid concrete. One of the victims was the architect himself.

16 years later, in 2009, the building is going to be destroyed. Samantha Walczak, an engineer for a demolition company (and also the daughter of the owner) is sent to examine the building to prepare for the explosions. She considers the building to be an architectural masterpiece and feels that it shouldn't be destroyed, but she has to do her job.

Is the building really so beautiful? Here's the view from the front. Note that the lower floors have hardly any windows. However luxuriously appointed the apartments may be, I don't appreciate the outer appearance. If anything, it reminds me of Birmingham's former central library.

Birmingham's Old Central Library

Both buildings are made of concrete which they aren't ashamed to display. Both buildings have the style of an inverted triangle, the library with the wider upper floors and the Malestrazza building with its window arrangement. I prefer the old library to the awfully multi-coloured new library.

Birmingham's New Central Library

Like all other forms of art, architecture is a matter of taste. All I can say is that whoever prefers the new library must have weird taste. The intersecting metal circles are supposed to be chic, but I just find them annoying.

But let's get back to the film. When Samantha arrives at the Malestrazza building only four people live in it. The caretaker and her adopted son Jimmy are in the building to look after it until its day of destruction. All the other tenants have been evicted, but two have refused to leave. One is an eccentric old woman who stole all of Malestrazza's architecture books after his death. The other is a construction worker who was originally blamed for the murders, but then found innocent, leaving the crimes unsolved.

None of the four are what they seem. Jimmy's mother was buried in the wall when she was pregnant. She was dead, but the child inside her was still alive, so her bodily functions were artificially maintained until Jimmy was born. The caretaker's husband was also walled in, so she has sworn revenge on whoever did it. She seems to know more than she says. Samantha finds the architectural books in the old woman's apartment fascinating, so she takes one of them. It's not illegal to steal a stolen item, is it? The book describes the architectural principles of the pyramids. Buildings weren't just made with stones, but also with human souls. The Egyptians buried people in the walls to strengthen a building. Just like in the Malestrazza building. Is that a coincidence?

I found the film's opening scene of a child being walled in the scariest, probably because I have a tendency to claustrophobia. None of the later scares in the film affected me as much. I don't feel that "Walled In" succeeds as a horror film. It's a competent mystery, but I had to shake my head at some of the plot twists in the later stages of the film.

Why do films need plot twists? Sometimes they're effective, but I have the feeling that nowadays screenwriters feel compelled to put in a twist, just to escape the criticism that the film is predictable. If a film is well made, whether it's a horror or a mystery film, I have no problem with the story being predictable. The film just has to be well made.

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