The directorial debut of former production designer Chris Gorak, who went on to direct the less than impressive science fiction action thriller The Darkest Hour (2011), was a timely low-key apocalypse made on the tiniest of budgets. Sometimes the lack of resources shows but for the most part Right at Your Door is a thought-provoking and gripping thriller.
A trio of “dirty bombs” are detonated in Los Angeles. The perpetrator is never identified (and it’s really unimportant who they are) but the effects of their attack is immediate and devastating. Packed with toxic chemicals and and unknown viral agent, the bombs create a lethal rain of white ash that brings a slow and agonising death to anyone who comes in contact with it. One victim is Lexi (Mary McCormack), on her way to work when the attack happens, who struggles home to find that her husband Brad (Rory Cochrane) and a local handyman Alvaro (Tony Perez) have taken the advice of the authorities that the hear on chaotic and often contradictory radio broadcasts and sealed up their house. Brad is faced with an unthinkable decision – does her leave Lexi outside to await the arrival of a medical team that is supposedly on its way to the area or let her in and risk killing himself and Alvaro?
The first half of Right at Your Door is excellent. We hear about the disaster on radio news broadcasts – Brad doesn’t initially turn the TV on (to save on the budget – no need to act out city-wide panic with radio) and when he does it doesn’t work. The attack is represented with supreme economy, just a chilling pall of smoke hanging over the LA skyline and the garbled, panic-stricken accounts of what’s happening on the ground from terrified radio news journalists. Brad’s panic and sense of hopelessness as he sets out to find Lexi only to run into a police force that is locking down the city and which has already become trigger happy is very identifiable, Gorak (who also scripted) immediately forcing audiences to question what they would do under similar circumstances.
Some have questioned whether the decision Brad makes not to allow Lexi into the house is at odds with the dedicated husband seen in the opening scenes but that’s sort of missing the point. Brad makes a decision which may or may not be the right one – he trusts the authorities to turn up as promised despite Lexi’s claim to her mother that what they’re hearing on the news doesn’t reflect what’s actually going on. As would be the case in real life, Brad has no clear idea what’s really going on (“It’s chemical shit,” is all he has to offer when Lexi asks him if he knows what’s happening) and is confused, frightened and perhaps deliberately mislead by the nonsense information being broadcast on the radio, “news” that is designed solely to placate the fears of people outside the city and to suppress panic.
Gorak gets a surprising amount of tension out of the situation by having extra characters impinging on Brad’s dilemma, including a man (Jon Huertas) who bursts into the house and claims that there’s a ship on the coast offering medicalk supplies and help, the sinister masked Corporal Marshall (Max Kasch) and his men and a young local boy, Timmy (Scotty Noyd Jr) that Lexi takes under her wing. The film slows down rather in the second half as it becomes clear that Gorak hasn’t quite got enough material to stretch to a full feature. A lot of the latter half gets bogged down with Brad and Lexi talking at great length through the flimsy barrier that Brad has erected to keep the toxins out about their future together.
It all descends into melodrama in the finale which doesn’t really make an awful lot of sense. It would have been tough to find any kind of satisfying ending to such a bleak scenario – a happy ending would have been unforgivable – but there’s a sense of desperation here, of striving for one last shock that comes out of nowhere and is completely non-sensical.
Performances by the small cast are uniformly first rate with Cochrane – from CSI: Miami (2002-2012) – doing the bulk of the heavy lifting. He perfectly captures the sense of utter powerlessness in the face of a disaster he can barely comprehend as he struggles to make decisions for which he is hopelessly ill-prepared. McCormack – from Murder One (1995-1997) and The West Wing (1999-2006) – is excellent too as the bewildered Lexi, unable to understand her husband’s decisions while slowly coming to terms with what has happened to her and her city. Technically, the film effortlessly dances around its meagre resources. Special effects are limited to the impressive smoke-laden skyline and the decision to trap Brad in his house keeps expensive location shooting to a bare minimum – we only venture outside briefly at the start of the film as Brad sets off in search of Lexi and he doesn’t get very far. Tom Richmond’s low-key photography – nothing flashy or distracting here – is excellent as is the score by Tomandandy.
Right at Your Door goes off the rails a little in the closing stages but for the most part is a clever, tense and above all challenging science fiction thriller that forces its audience to think the unthinkable and ask themselves what they would do in such circumstances. It may be accused of buying into the paranoias rife in the States after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and the fumbled disaster relief response to Hurricane Katrina which devastated great areas of the southeast United States as Gorak was editing his film, but it also questions those paranoias and the way that the media may become, willingly or otherwise, instrumental in fuelling them. It’s a flawed but thought-provoking film that offers no easy answers.
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