Entrance – 2011 LAFF

Given how incredible nearly every single movie at the Los Angeles Film Festival had been up until Saturday night, I shouldn’t be all that surprised that, finally, the winning streak had come to an end with the premiere of Entrance. This is the type of movie that transforms the term “indie film” into a four-letter-word.

You know when you try to describe a movie to someone who is more accustomed to standard Hollywood fare as “indie” and they give you that knowing “Ohhh” in response. As if no more needs to be said. They get it. It’s going to be slow. It’s going to be boring. It’s going to have very little going on. It’s going to have a lot of hand-held camera and low production value. It’s going to have no-name actors, some of whom probably can’t act. And normally you’d try to defend the movie, explain how it works and offers a different yet still worthwhile film experience. But, sometimes, as in the case of Entrance, there’s nothing to defend.

Directors and co-writers Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath shot this in and around Silver Lake here in Los Angeles on HD video in a mere 12 days – three of which were actually nights. Horvath described the film as being about an existential crisis that leads to a real crisis. And that would be apt were the first part true. Indeed, he’s right about the real crisis that embodies the two, 10-plus-minute-long takes of the third act – but, sadly, everything leading up to it is hollow and empty, which I blame on the script. Mainly. The lead actress, Suziey Block playing a character also named Suziey, occupies nearly every single frame in the film and carries the burden of making it all work and unfortunately, she just doesn’t have the pathos to pull it off. She’s a pretty face who seems unhappy but that’s about it. At the same time, it’s not all her fault since most of the first half of the movie simply follows her through her mundane, daily routine – wakes up, makes coffee, feeds her dog, takes a shower, puts on her makeup, walks to work, works, walks home, sleeps, repeat, repeat, repeat. The script needs to give her something to do that makes us feel her existential crisis. And I certainly didn’t.

For the final turn into real crisis, our connection with Suziey will determine whether or not we find it terrifying or comically bad. Given how little we felt for her leading up to the melee and how little we know or care about any of the other characters at the dinner party-turned-massacre, there’s really no other way to react but to laugh and shake your head at the absurdity of it all. To be fair, it wasn’t apparent from the beginning that the film would ever have ended on such a scene. So in that sense Hallam and Horvath did a solid job of making us all think that we were just sitting through another boring character study when in fact we were about to get slammed right into a full-on slasher flick.

Entrance started off more like an amateur retread of Wendy & Lucy, although Block is no Michelle Williams and these filmmakers let their similar plot device – Suziey’s beloved dog, Darryl, goes missing – go off into far different directions. In fact, it’s almost a non-plot: she spends maybe five minutes of screen time doing anything toward trying to find her pooch before she goes right back into her “existential crisis” of moping through her life, not bothering to do anything toward changing the things that make her unhappy. It’s hard to feel for someone who is this passive even when genuinely traumatic things happen to her like losing her pet. And that’s what keeps Entrance from being a successful genre mash-up: if you’re going to do a character study, you need to make us connect with that character – otherwise the rest of it is just pointless, no matter what twists and turns you provide.