White Chamber review: From filmmaker Paul Raschid comes this inventive genre piece that refuses to play by the rules, starring The Decent’s Shauna McDonald.
White Chamber review by Paul Heath.
White Chamber review
If you’re going to make a low budget horror movie – or any movie, in fact – you’re better off limiting your scenes to as few locations as possible. Such examples, of course, are the likes of Saw, Buried and Cube, three very successful movies with limited spends. Joining that list is 25-year-old Paul Raschid’s film White Chamber, which plays at London’s FrightFest following an impressive debut at Edinburgh earlier this year.
The film opens with Shauna Macdonald’s ‘Ruth’ waking up extremely disorientated in the clinical cuboid room of the title. It is the United Kingdom in the near future, the country in turmoil as socio-economic tensions have led to an all-out civil war as the State battles rebel militia for power. We learn all of this from an informing voiceover during the opening moments of the film, before meeting our main protagonist, locked in a very confined space with little memory of how she got there. This is classic genre territory, a voice coming from somewhere outside instructing its prisoner to adhere to his demands – or else. It seems that this room can be adjusted instantly to extremes of temperature, drop acid onto its victims and just about anything one can dream up.
The voice is asking for information about the facility and the lab which we presume is located outside. Like us, Ruth, who professes that she is merely an ‘admin girl’, has no idea, so is punished using various methods by her unseen tormentor.
White Chamber review
There is a dynamic shift part-way into Raschid’s film, one we won’t reveal by elaborating on the plot further, which pushes it away from any cliche it may have been heading for prior, and as it moves away from what was expected, it becomes a much bigger film in scale and ambition. The filmmaker refuses to use heavy CGI or grand, expensive effects even when the action moves away from the four walls of the titular White Chamber, practical effects, (sometimes gruesome) make-up and sets relied upon which are very much welcomed.
While I personally would have liked to have spent more time in the chamber – the film’s strongest sections are when we’re dealing with McDonald’s character in the white room -rather than dystopian sci-fi which the film does tip-toe into, the action does move along nicely. I found the script to be ambitious when it is expanded in the second act if it is sometimes a little predictable.
The performances, particularly from its leads in McDonald and Oded Fehr, are solid, and there’s also great support from its limited supporting cast that includes Amrita Acharia, Sharon Maughan, Nicolas Farrell and Candis Nergaard.
Write and director Raschid is clearly one to watch as the raw ingredients for a solid genre piece that dares to tread outside of safe territory are clearly present. Those foundations don’t quite lead to a perfect, overall experience, but there’s still a lot to enjoy in his second feature.
White Chamber review by Paul Heath.
White Chamber screened as part of Arrow Video Frightfest 2018.
