1BR, No Pets…
#OtherWorlds2019 approaches! To gear up, staff members are sharing the feature films they’re most excited about and why. Next up, Programmer and Screenwriting Director Eric Harrelson gives us a sneak peek the Texas premiere of 1BR (which screens Saturday, December 7 at 1:50PM as part of the Under Worlds sidebar):
1BR is a tense, gritty film that forces us to evaluate how we envision we would react when placed in an impossibly horrible situation. Do you think you’re a fighter? Are you going to scream and thrash and bite and claw? Do you think you could use your brains? Stay calm, notice patterns, and rationalize your way out? Would you just give up?
To be clear, 1BR is not some sort of SAW imitation. There’s no convoluted, video game style puzzles involving Rube Goldberg murder contraptions that tear your face off if you’re not able to dig a key out of someone’s guts, or use spring-loaded razor wire to slice your legs off if you can’t, like, I dunno, solve a sliding block puzzle. I don’t really know what SAW does. I mean apart from the puppet on a tricycle, but I digress. 1BR explores what it is to truly break someone, and challenges the audience to put themselves in the place of Sarah, our protagonist.
Sarah moves to L.A., looking to escape her overbearing father and pursue her dream of being a costume designer. Working a crap temp job and living in a hotel, she is still looking for a bit of luck. She finds that luck in the form of an ideal apartment, and manages to beat out numerous other interested parties, which I take it is difficult in L.A. She meets some of her neighbors, a friendly old lady, and a handsome young man, along with other perfectly nice couples and families. Sarah does, however, have a pet cat, which is in violation of the building’s no pets policy. Almost immediately, strange noises keep her up at night, and her neighbors are not happy about her violating the rules. Sarah is alone in a new city, friendless and estranged from her father, with no one but her neighbors to turn to for help.
When 1BR gets going, it taps into very real primal and visceral fears, triggering our fight or flight responses. It forces us into the shoes of Sarah, and makes us really evaluate our own reactions and what it would take to make us break. Sarah has to face the pressure and horror of her situation without any help from friends or family, so complete is her isolation. 1BR manages to effectively accomplish this without gratuitous and unnecessary violence.
1BR shares some DNA with ROSEMARY’S BABY, although where the threat to Mia Farrow is in question, we know something horrible is happening to Sarah, we just don’t know what. When the threat is revealed we are then left wondering what Sarah will do to cope.
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