“Entrance” is available Nationwide on IFC Midnight Cable VOD and other Digital Outlets
There really is nothing better than finding a small, little film that no one has heard of and dusting off the soapbox so that you can scream to anyone who will listen about your discovery. The exercise can be painful, however, as watching every lo-fi indie flick waiting to find a gem in the stack of crap can be a solid definition of the word tedium.
So I had some hope in my heart as I started “Entrance”. IFC Midnight, the genre division of IFC Films, is distributing the film, which is a legit outlet for small, homegrown horror films that are usually culled from the festival circuit. But “Entrance” is too lo-fi, too handmade and I couldn’t shake the sense that I was watching a movie a group of struggling L.A. actors made at their house over a couple of weekends.
The film spends its first hour following Suzy (Suziey Block) through her day-to-day life. She brushes her teeth, feeds the dog, walks around, and makes coffee as a barista at a local coffee shop with an ease that makes one assume that the real Suziey makes her living slinging beans at that very same coffee shop.
This is all very slice-of-life filmmaking and is fine to establish Suziey as a normal person walking the streets of the City of Angels but the quality of the production kills the movie. The sound captured during these scenes vary so wildly that most of the time you can not make out what is being said. There is no music, just ambient noise that sounds like something you would capture for your own home movies. While the intent might have been an avant-garde , Dogme 95 approach to handmade storytelling the result is simply amateurish.
The film does pick up some steam in its last act as “the conflict” (I will not ruin it. I will not spoil) presents itself and Suzy runs through the rest of the film in long takes that effectively causes some tension. But these moments come way too late and I got the sense that the filmmakers (the movie was directed by two aspiring directors; Dallas Hallam & Patrick Horath) behind “Entrance” had the climax of the film as their true idea and the entire lead up is merely filler. The idea would have worked much better as a short film. That would have saved us all some time.