Walled In (2009) - 2.5/4

Walled In, based on the psychological thriller Les emmurés by French author Serge Brussolo, concerns a pretty, young engineer (Mischa Barton) assigned to find a building's weak points for her dad's demolition company. The building is an odd structure built in the middle of some marshland by an eccentric Italian architect, Malestrazza. During construction, a madman cemented several inhabitants into the walls. The only inhabitants left are Deborah Kara Unger, her intense son, and two other weirdos. Assisted by the boy, the engineer finds discrepencies in the building's blueprints and gradually uncovers more of its secrets.

Walled In is the sort of European thriller that would have been very much at home in the '70s, alongside films like The House of Laughing Windows. Like such films, Walled In has a serious, artistic sensibility that seems at odds with the conventional macabre the content seems to keep steering toward and yet never revealing. At times psychological thriller and at times suggesive ghost story, Walled In never quite settles until the disappointing climax. The building itself and its provocative nature is really what sustains the whole film.

The source of just about all the trouble with Walled In is how much the narrative fixates on the teen boy. After a fascinating first twenty minutes that sets up the film's major conflict between a talented engineer and an almost living building she respects too much to want to destroy, nearly all the plot twists and turns center on whether she can trust the boy or not. The questions of what Malestrazza was up to, what the real purpose of his mysterious building is, whether it is haunted, what was the real reason for the immuring of the victims--all the truly interesting questions, in other words--are largely left in abeyance and only answered peripherally to the questions regarding the boy.

The boy is just not that interesting. As a side-order grotesque, he would be fine. But as the entree, he is not. This is not the actor's fault at all. On the contrary, Cameron Bright performs the character with the awkward stiffness the character seems to really need. The screenplay is at fault for presenting the character as just a bland, melodramatic device. It is unfortunate that the tale's climax and conclusion ultimately hinges on just this melodrama.

While I have not had a chance to read the novel, I suspect it is filled with philosophical discourses and historical speculations that director Gilles Paquet-Brenner was at pains to work into engaging cinema. There are a lot of great ideas throughout that just don't quite work. Walled In certainly has much to recommend, particularly Karim Hussain's beautiful and potent photography of the spooky, dystopian set and the Saskatchewan grasslands. Much as similarly confused films, like Mariano Baino's Dark Waters, Walled In will probably be re-discovered a decade or two later as a forgotten gem of 2009. Do yourself a favor and just discover it now for what it is