Gateway

This type of the haunted house is gonna git ya story has been done so often, it's almost impossible to recall how many times I've seen it, here just given a miserable, suburban council house retread.

Assured cinematography & decent performances can't mitigate the terrible decision to make this a total misery-fest, with a cast of entirely unsympathetic characters & a sound track which would drive the most mentally sound to consider topping themselves.

The few horror elements that there were, missed the usual tricks to make the audience jump, this may have been the intention, to avoid overused tropes, but they were genuinely needed here, to help the viewer along. The gateway of the title, does indeed appear & does offer some intrigue, what, why, how etc, but it all comes to nought & we're left with no answers, thanks movie!

The fault here lies with the writer & director, single-mindedly making what they want, regardless of how this won't entertain the audience, you can make a dark, torturous ride, but you have to take the paying customer with you.

Slow as molasses tale of a gang who decide to take over an abandoned house to grow weed in. In an upstairs bedroom is a gateway to...somewhere hellish. There's too much build-up that doesn't do anything to heighten the experience; we don't know them any better, the better to care about what happens to them. Then there's too much silent watching. The mood is dark and dreadful, but that's not enough. It feels more like a crime saga, but still, one I don't care too much about.

This has got to be one of the most boring movies i have ever watched. Literally, NOTHING happens. It's just talk, talk, talk...then minute-long shots of the faces of the actors brooding. There was one scene of a man staring at the camera with his mouth open. Then he talks around the house till he sees two other men taking drugs in slow motion. That went on for a solid 3 minutes. What the point of that scene was not even the director knows. Just an awful movie. This isn't horror. The only scary thing about this movie is the idea of having to sit through it again. You might be thinking, was there anything redeeming about this movie? Sure. It was filmed really well. But that's it.

I'm a huge fan of the "How the f&*% did we get here" kind of films, and the synopsis really felt like it was going to be in that style.

Unfortunately, about 85% of the movie is just nothing. A bunch of hoodlums doing hoodlum stuff, milling about, doing nothing, etc...

I was so bored to absolute tears that I'm pretty sure my brain just turned off until the monotony of the banal hoodlum slice of life portion of the film was over that I barely knew what was even going on.

I will say the acting was passable, everyone did really well, but you can only do so much with writing that consists of "Do hoodlum things like walk around and do nothing for 85% of the film."

The acting is great and the cinematography is great. The plot is incredibly boring and hard to make sense of. I am not even sure I would classify this as horror, maybe more like a psychological drama. Slow burn is one thing but geez.