Hey Kevin, It's Me Britney
A dead-on dirty bomb scenario, Right at Your Door comes with Xanax and a little hat
image courtesy of Lions Gate
By Zach Stephenson A dirty bomb goes off in your metropolis. There is mass confusion. Emergency and information lines are all red tape and busy signals. You duct tape your house so the contagion cannot enter. Your spouse still hasn't returned home. Then he or she does, clearly exposed. Decisions. Right at Your Door, a situational terror film that draws on the severe bummer that is America's future, is the directorial debut of Chris Gozak, who served as the art director on similar half-empty paranoia classics like Fight Club and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Straying away from the usual blend of heroic subplots we are accustomed to not watching on 24, and outfitted with anxieties even Patton Oswalt couldn't make funny, this is surely the best "apocalyptic arthouse movie" ever. Watching the film's lead deny his sick wife a dying sanctuary in the house she paid for strikes a much deeper chord of reality than the feel-good comradery of Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center aka Where You Going To Hide, Nic Cage's Mustache? This is the film we should have all expected from Stone or Darren Aronofsky. The latter half does for dirty bomb scenarios what Requeim for a Dream did for drug addiction. Aid promised by the news is non-existent in a rainstorm of poisonous ash and dead birds, as radical "doctors" gather the infected at gunpoint. Sound plausibly bleak? That’s why the film works. As you drive home, you can’t help but to play out the scenario with your surroundings and loved ones. If you've done your homework, life will indeed imitate art this time, it's only a matter of when and where. Oh, and the film's ending is truly yikes.
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