Gateway

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.

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."

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.

The lo/no budget film is a business card for the director, if you scour youtube, you can find the early work of Shane Meadows and it was clear to anyone watching those one location, no budget short films that this director should be given the means to expand his stories, so rich are the characters and narrative.

Gateway could just as easily be so considered, this is the tale of a crew of petty criminals looking to break into the big time but choosing the wrong house for their plan, the characters are well fleshed out and dialogue sounds authentic coming from the individual players in the story. If I could point out just one thing for any future work, and this is completely subjective, something I wondered about while watching, would be the blocking, I felt that such an intricate meshing of two storylines would have been much more dynamic if the characters moved about a bit more during dialogue scenes, but as I say, completely subjective, they may have been static to add to the sense of powerlessness that they gang were experiencing as they struggled to get a grip on the supernatural happenings in their hiding place.

The intensity was extremely well executed, there is a very effective, surreal sequence where the main protagonist is unable to move as he witnesses his own history playing out in front of him, it really hit the mark, anyone who has considered their own historic deeds or words will identify with the scene.

Overall the film was engaging, believable dialogue, I'd love to see what Niall Owens could do if freed from the restraints of a limited budget, I'd say, watch this space.

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.