Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Charbonier, Justin Powell
Starring: Alicia Sanz, Raúl Castillo, Gore Abrams, David Alexander Flinn, Justin Marcel McManus
With their first two movies, The Djinn and The Boy Behind the Door, the filmmaking duo of David Charbonier and Justin Powell established themselves as masters of generating tension and
suspense in single location settings. The Djinn took place entirely in a rather cramped bungalow. The Boy Behind the Door opened out to a two-storey gothic home. With their latest, Push, the duo have the run of a sprawling mansion. There's a lot of home to
be invaded in this home invasion thriller.
And we get a lot of home before the invasion. Charbonier and Powell open
their film by giving us a guided tour of the setting, a steadicam sweeping
through every room and up and down stairs, though leaving a few nooks and
crannies to be revealed later on. The home in this home invasion thriller
isn't actually a home though; it's a vacant mansion up for sale. Young
realtor Natalie (Alicia Sanz) has been tasked with showing it off
to prospective buyers, but the house's history of murders and freak
accidents means she's left twiddling her thumbs waiting for clients to
show up. Just as the sun is setting and Natalie is about to lock up, a man
(Raúl Castillo) arrives for a viewing. His creepy demeanour
unsettles Natalie, and she's relieved when he departs. But then Natalie
finds her car won't start, and the man has apparently returned with murder
on his mind.
The selling point of this stock setup is that Natalie happens to be
heavily pregnant, and in the middle of her ordeal her water breaks.
There's a nail-biting scene where Natalie struggles to manoeuvre her baby bump through a small gap as her attacker bears down,
but otherwise Charbonier and Powell fail to come up with novel ways to
take advantage of their heroine's disadvantage. For stretches of the
film you might even forget Natalie is pregnant, given how nimble she is
in evading her stalker.
On a technical level, Push is as impressive as you would expect from this pair of talented
filmmakers. The influence of John Carpenter is clear in how they use the
empty space of their widescreen frame to keep us on edge as we wait for
the antagonist to pop out of the shadows painted in the background by
cinematographer Daniel Katz. I'm slightly biased as he's an
old friend of mine, but Katz is one of the most exciting DoPs currently
working in American indie cinema and this is his most impressive work to
date. With the setting bathed in a combination of icy blue moonlight and
the warm amber glow of lamps, Push has the aesthetic of Dean Cundey's collaborations with
Carpenter.
While it can't be faulted as a technical exercise, Push lacks a beating heart. Its heroine and villain are as generic a
pair of foes as you'll find in genre cinema. Natalie is defined merely
by the child she's carrying inside her, and all we get in terms of
character backstory are a few clichéd flashbacks of her rolling around
in white sheets with her now dead husband (I guess a dead hubby makes a
change from the usual dead wife). Unlike the child protagonists of
Charbonier and Powell's previous films, Natalie displays scant
resourcefulness when it comes to defeating her aggressor. Castillo is a
suitably menacing presence, and his sweater tucked in over a bulging
waistline gives him the appearance of Joe Spinell in Maniac. But we learn almost nothing about his motivations, and a
sequel-baiting post-credits scene only serves to cause further
confusion. After three movies set almost entirely in the confines of a
house, Charbonier and Powell seem to have finally run out of
storytelling floor space. It might be time for them to expand their
canvas if they're to live up to the promise of their early work.
Push is on Shudder from July
11th.
