1BR (2019)

Studio:      Dark Sky Films
Director:    David Marmor
Writer:      David Marmor
Producer:  Alok Mishra, Shane Vorster, Sam Sandweiss, Allard Cantor, Jarrod Murray, Nic Izzi, Jake Alden-Falconer
Stars:     Nicole Brydon Bloom, Giles Matthey, Taylor Nichols, Alan Blumenfeld, Celeste Sully, Susan Davis, Clayton Hoff, Earnestine Phillips, Naomi Grossman

Review Score:

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Summary:

A timid young woman tries starting a new life in Los Angeles only to discover the residents of her apartment building are hiding a shocking secret.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Having left home to start a new life in Los Angeles, Sarah is selected from among all other applicants to move into the Asilo Del Mar apartment building. Sarah meets building manager Jerry, Jerry’s wife Janice, attractive neighbor Brian, and elderly former actress Edie Stanhope. Because the property does not allow pets, Sarah sneaks in her cat Giles.

Sarah meets other friendly residents at a community barbecue in the courtyard. Lester, a skittish neighbor with an eye patch, tries giving Sarah a copy of Professor Charles D. Ellerby’s self-help book “The Power of Community,” but Sarah refuses.

Odd noises in the walls regularly wake Sarah during the night. Sarah also finds herself strangely unable to refill her Zoloft prescription. While helping Edie back to her apartment, Sarah discovers that she too has a copy of the Ellerby book.

An anonymous letter left under her door threatens Sarah over her unwelcome cat.

Sarah accepts a dinner party invite from Brian, but is unable to attend when her boss forces Sarah to work unpaid overtime. Sarah instead comes home to eat Thai food with her confident coworker Lisa. Sarah tells Lisa how the problematic apartment has unsettled her head, prompting Lisa to suggest they find a new place to live together. Sarah asks Lisa for advice on being assertive as she recounts how her disapproving father Gus still interferes with her life.

The smoke alarm wakes Sarah that night. Sarah finds her cat burning in the oven. Brian suddenly captures Sarah and restrains her to a chair. Sarah breaks free and escapes to the hallway, but is recaptured by other residents. Jerry cryptically claims that they are trying to help Sarah as Brian injects her with a sedative.

Sarah wakes up locked in a barren room. Jerry and Brian reveal that they impersonated Sarah through social media and other methods to get her fired, close her bank accounts, offend Lisa, and ensure that no one would come looking for her.

Jerry warns Sarah to comply with their instructions or else be punished. Jerry shows how Lester was maimed and had an eye removed when he initially resisted in an escape attempt.

For a month, Sarah is forced to stand against a wall in a painful position while listening to loud music. Jerry claims the conditioning is for Sarah’s own good and promises she will come to thank him. Sent to console her, Edie tells Sarah to simply give in.

After she finally collapses from frustrated exhaustion, Brian nails Sarah’s hands to the wall. Sarah rips her hands from the nails when she hallucinates her father coming to rescue her.

Sarah eventually breaks. She and Jerry embrace. Residents clean her up. Sarah begins undergoing invasive interviews with Jerry and Brian. She also studies Ellerby’s book, whose philosophy on community teaches the tenets of selflessness, openness, acceptance, and security.

During one of her questioning sessions, Sarah reveals that she caught her father Gus cheating on her dying mother with her mother’s nurse. Sarah threatened to reveal the affair, but Gus knew Sarah would not have the nerve to upset her mother. Sarah’s mother died without knowing the truth about Gus.

Sarah’s indoctrination continues for several more months. Sarah begins taking on tasks to help the community before being promoted to monitoring the building’s cameras with Brian. Sarah notices a camera in the surveillance suite. Sarah asks who is watching them, but Brian says it is none of their business.

Sarah intervenes when Edie nearly dies. However, Sarah’s relief turns to shock when Edie is willingly euthanized anyway because she can no longer contribute to the community.

Sarah finally becomes fully initiated. With the other residents present, Jerry brands Sarah behind her ear with their cult’s symbol. Sarah learns she is to become Lester’s new spouse, as he lost his previous wife Jessica to cancer six months earlier.

Sarah’s father Gus shows up unexpectedly. Jerry instructs Sarah to make Gus leave and never come back. Sarah nearly cracks when Gus makes an emotional plea. However, Brian threatens to kill Gus, compelling Sarah to insult her father over his affair. Gus regretfully slaps his daughter and leaves Sarah in tears.

Two months later, the building hosts another open house. Sarah is surprised to see Lisa as one of the prospective tenants. Believing he can save her from her selfish life, Jerry chooses Lisa. Sarah warns Jerry that Lisa has strong willpower and will put up more of a fight than she did.

Lisa undergoes the same indoctrination as Sarah to cut off her life and become conditioned. Jerry recruits Sarah to talk to Lisa when she resists Brian’s torture. However, Lisa turns the tables by challenging Sarah to take control of her own life.

Jerry forces Sarah to hold an awl in Lisa’s ear while he prepares to hit it with a hammer. Lisa tells Sarah, “it’s your life.” Sarah stabs Jerry with the awl instead. Jerry recovers and shoots Lisa dead with a handgun. Sarah retrieves the awl and stabs Jerry to death. Sarah is surprised to see that Jerry has a brand and hand wounds, indicating he was once a member of the cult and not its creator.

Sarah uses the handgun to hold off the other residents in the courtyard. Sarah tells everyone they are free, but Brian counters that no one can ever leave. Brian explains that the community consists of everyone and Jerry was not their leader.

Sarah shoots Brian and flees to the building’s front door. Another resident grabs Sarah as Lester recovers the dropped gun. Surprisingly, Lester shoots the man holding Sarah. Lester then blocks the door from other residents so Sarah can escape. Lester finally shoots himself.

Sarah sees that all of the apartment buildings on the street have the cult’s symbol on their signs. Alarms sound throughout the neighborhood. Sarah laughs hysterically as she realizes she is trapped, but she still clenches her fists and runs forward.

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Review:

You can tell right away that something is off about Sarah’s new Hollywood apartment. Residents smile and wave as they pass one another at the mailboxes. Men and women of varying ages and ethnicities convene over coffee in the courtyard. These neighbors help carry laundry, host community barbecues, and regularly invite relative strangers to dinner.

I’ve had half a dozen different apartments since moving to Los Angeles. The reality of communal living out here involves looking down to avoid eye contact, waiting until someone passes by in the hallway before opening your door to go out, and an unspoken understanding that everyone keeps to themselves unless communication is absolutely necessary. Exceptions might be fire, an earthquake, or finding out whose car is blocking your assigned parking space again.

You know how nobody walks in L.A.? Nobody talks to each other either.

You can’t blame Sarah for not knowing better. She’s new to the City of Angels. Anxious to escape an overbearing father who cheated on her dying mother, Sarah went west to pursue a dream of becoming a costume designer. That’s as far as her courage extends. Meekness stops Sarah from standing up to the boss asking her to work unpaid overtime, and to the pharmacist refusing to refill a prescription. Her first glimmer of friendliness comes in the form of this unusual building where residents roll out a merry welcome wagon fit for Mayberry.

Kindliness comes with caveats. First, Sarah has to endure sleepless nights due to odd noises gurgling behind the walls. Then comes the threatening letter regarding the unauthorized housecat she secretly sneaked into the complex. Most unsettling of all, a shadowy shape secretly stalks Sarah. When it finally pounces, she takes her first step toward uncovering the truth about the community she now belongs to, whether she wants to remain there willingly or not.

“1BR’s” slow-to-melt setup charges a toll that viewers must pay with patience. Its deliberately bleak color palette claps at distracted eyes to stay focused. Those who oblige will find those modest fees to be a bargain. Once the film’s hypnotic spell completes its initial incantation, “1BR” also completes its application to join an exclusive shortlist of minimalist thrillers whose solid suspense becomes built on the backs of a low budget and unfamiliar cast, not in spite of them.

The setting’s monochromatic drabness accurately reflects the debilitating dullness of apartment living in Los Angeles. I’d swear the same developer built every complex erected between 1940 and 1980 from the same blocky blueprint of blandness. “1BR” might have even filmed in a former residence of mine. There’s no way to tell one apartment building from the other only by looking at them. It’s an eggshell mood meant to add “in” to “distinguishable,” in terms of residents as well as units. That theme is integral to “1BR’s” central premise of being lulled into compliant complacency.

“1BR” takes drops of color from its cast. Nicole Brydon Bloom’s blank-faced vacancy warns that she won’t be an enigmatically engaging personality. She’s not supposed to be. Bloom plays Sarah like a red-robed handmaid, one of society’s many unremarkable passersby whose malleable mind remains ripe for redirection. Hers is an intentionally plain performance, which sets up Sarah to undergo a believably transformative arc of both undeserved and “you brought this on yourself” suffering.

Longtime character actor Taylor Nichols works his own niche as Sarah’s building manager masking a second career as a cult leader. Taylor’s soft-spoken demeanor disarms Sarah and the audience alike, making his disturbing turn into tormenter all the more uncomfortable.

Susan Davis similarly stands out as elderly neighbor Edie Stanhope, a former B-movie star whose days of fame are long behind her. Davis belongs to a quietly quirky crew that includes Clayton Hoff as a one-eyed weirdo, Celeste Sully as Sarah’s crassly confident coworker, and Giles Matthey as a red herring love interest whose true nature trumps Nichols in terms of switch-flipping swings. Collective creepiness propels an uphill climb through mounting dread, with credit due to the cast for keeping “1BR” on that track.

For his first feature, writer/director David Marmor covers a lot of ground through subtext. Don’t let that turn you off. First and foremost, “1BR” functions as a strong psychological shocker. Some implications are open to interpretation, but this isn’t an ambiguously arty exercise in auteur indulgence.

Even with its emphasis on smoldering terror, “1BR” tells a frightening fable about loneliness, paranoia, independence, and identity. I’m not sure the film answers the question it asks with its warning about eyes turned into their phones instead of at human beings. The movie indirectly implies that the isolating reality I described earlier might be preferable to this alarming alternative. Maybe Marmor merely means to dig at self-help culture, specifically a certain philosophy popular with celebrities.

Almost echoing Sarah’s situation, it’s really up to you to decide how much the meaning matters, if at all. Taken only as entertainment, “1BR” still leaves you with unsettling suggestions akin to “The Invitation’s” ending (review here). Personally, I’m always intrigued by efficiently made, cult-connected chillers. If you are too, “1BR” will eerily entrance you.

Review Score: 85

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