I often complain that contemporary horror films Shlok throw too much at you – style if this formula – demon – or – tactic – doesn’t work – try this – one approach to keeping audiences in a daze. Having said that, I’m not sure if it’s just bones, we only have one formula, a scare tactic in our simplicity in the bag is the answer. In “Room 203”, a pair of friends – Kim (Francesca Zureb), a college student of journalism, and Izzy (Victoria Vinjarska), aspiring actress and spoiled party girl are still traumatized by her mother’s death. An apartment together in a converted eccentric old commercial building.
How do we know that the place is intended to infiltrate us? Because they’re in Room 203, which looks like a half-finished boutique hotel suite, and when you name the movie “Room 203,” you undoubtedly conjure up “The Shining” (where Room 237 was, but still). Because the owner, in a hat and tie, is named Ronan (Scott Grimillion) and acts as the lone freak competitor in the John Malkovich impersonation contest for Best Zoom. And because the apartment has not one demonic feature, but two excessively telegraph demonic features. There is a large stained-glass window depicting knights being stabbed through their shields with swords. And there’s a hole in the wall, in the middle of the antique powder blue wallpaper.
It’s a rather small hole that looks like the result of an accident in the plaster, but if you try to hang a mirror over it, it won’t work. (The mirror will either disappear or fall and break.) If you get inside, you may find a mysterious necklace; The slot will even hold your arm. It smells weird and looks like a rotting wound. All in all, however, the pit doesn’t do much. If Catherine Deneuve in “Aversion” had encountered this hatch, she would hardly have closed her eyes.
We assume the hole should lead to the other side, a place where cheap scare tactics abound. The problem with ‘Room 203’ is that almost all of it happens This is amazing On the side, most of what happens there is maladroit enough to make you long for cheap scare tactics. Our roommates vacillate between grumpy girl screeching and annoyingly ignorant, because the dialogue they have to speak—three screenwriters who struggled, including the director, Ben Jagger—has such an explanatory smallness to make you believe what you want. Re-vision. J School’s student heroine shouldn’t say, “Call me romantic, but I think there’s something special about the written word.” No gothic fashionista as ambitious as Izzy should say, “This is vintage, and I’m a booze queen!” No fearful owner should say, “I went downstairs. The basement is off-limits to residents. Don’t go down there.”
The film also features general totems of fear such as a music box, a demonic amulet hanging from knots, black crows, a Celtic and pagan symbol embedded in stained glass, and the 50-year-old newspaper headline “Bank manager kills pregnant wife and then commits suicide.” (And their initials are written on the music box!) When Kim gets to college on orientation day, she’s late and ends up receiving a private tour by the cute nerd mentor leader, Ian (Eric Wiegand). Classes are given remotely, but the fact that we never see a single other student on this campus makes it seem like the filmmakers can’t afford to hire extras. The whole movie feels deserted. Kim and Izzy are like roommates in a room full of emptiness. You still want them to go through that hole, until they’re out of the house.
[ad_2]
