 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Gateway • Year: 2021 • Country: Ireland • Director: Niall Owens • Main cast: Tim Creed, Kevin Barry, Laurence Ubong Williams, Finbarr Stanton, Joe Lyons • Runtime: 80 minutes • Production company: Pic Du Jer Productions • TRAILER |
Since the beginning of the new century, Irish cinema is becoming one of the ones with the most characteristic elements. Horror comedies like the recent Extra Ordinary (2019) and Let the Wrong One In (2021) stand by themselves with a great strong personality, witness, and sense of humor that no other film from another nationality can display at the moment; others deal with some of the many and rich folk traditions paying big respect to the environment and Mother Nature like Without Name (2016) or Wake Wood (2009); while some others are rough crime stories mainly focusing on the characters and the family situations they live in, in the style Guy Ritchie opened with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) before the turn of the millennium.
The movie Gateway (2021), acknowledging the many differences, belongs to this last group. A bunch of low-life criminals choose an abandoned house as a shelter for their drug-dealing activities. But what first looked like a safe place becomes a real nightmare, since something really sinister and dark resides between those walls.
If you are looking for a straight narrative that goes from point A to point B then probably this is not your kind of movie. Because the writer and director Niall Owens is focused on giving all the information to follow the story drop by drop, whenever he finds it’s necessary, and never giving you all the facts so the audience can make up their own version of the story. That is a good practice, who doesn’t like a movie that is candy for the brain, a real jigsaw treat. But, sadly, here we find more questions than answers. The filmmakers put the events happening in the film on the table in a very chaotic way, and the plot is very hard to find. Both the personal hell tormenting the characters and the supernatural characteristics living in the house are never clearly disclosed, and by the time the movie is over one looks back not being sure what we’ve seen.
The biggest flaw of Gateway (2021) is the storytelling because the performances of the actors are intense and the photography is as cold and rude as the situations the characters are living. Special kudos to the soundtrack of the film, performed by the ethnomusicologist and musician Tony Langlois, creating a dense and disturbing ambient of electronic distorted noisy but calm drone score that can work by itself as an independent art piece. Without a doubt, the most outstanding aspect of the movie.
I got disconnected from the plot and the characters’ disadventures too early in the movie, perhaps that’s not the best kind of narration for me, we all are humans, therefore it was a hard task for me to enjoy the film. But, with this text, you have enough description to make yourself an idea of what you might find in Gateway (2021) so it is up to you to give it a try or a pass. The movie is already available on digital platforms.
RATE: 4/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt8765666
