Writer: Lou Simon
Director: Lou Simon
Agoraphobia begins with a man chopping up a dead body. This is an excellent scene – he clearly isn’t a slasher, he’s not enjoying himself and keeps asking “What have I done?”. Quick flashes of bits of body are more effective than full on gore would be. The whole scene is gripping and effective.
If only the same could be said of the rest of the film.
The main story revolves around Fay (Cassandra Scerbo), a lifelong agoraphobic who gets panic attacks if she even gets close to an open door. After her father’s death she inherits his large house in the Florida countryside. Her psychiatrist Doctor Murphy (a superb Tony Todd) suggests that spending some time there might help her recover from her condition. There’s a nice, large glass patio door that she can inch closer to every day…
So Fay and husband Tom (a less impressive Adam Brudnicki) move into the house. However Fay soon starts seeing a dark presence which she suspects is the ghost of her father. Is it all in her mind or is the house really haunted?
So apart from the agoraphobia – which effectively traps Fay in the house – it’s a fairly standard set up and one that can be very effective. Unfortunately after that first scene Agoraphobia is pretty dull.
Not only do things happen at a snail’s pace but there’s no real atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s all too bright; a story like this needs shadows and flickering gaslight. There’s also a problem in the fact that the specifics of Fay’s agoraphobia are barely used; despite being the title of the film she could for the most part be suffering from almost any mental illness.
Near the end the plot suddenly takes a classic turn that I didn’t really like and which is badly handled. It’s all a bit too sudden and presented in a single big infodump – maybe if the audience had been let in on things earlier the dramatic irony would have worked better. After that the story makes a brave but failed attempt to twist the twist.
Agoraphobia should have been better than it is. Unfortunately the core idea seems to have got lost somewhere along the way and it ends up being a generic slow-burn psychological thriller that never really catches fire.