The Scary Thing about Storage Movies is Getting ‘Locked In’ Like This One (Movie Review)
Locked In
Rating: 9/10
Director and Writer: Carlos V. Gutierrez
Style: Crime Thriller
Time: 90 minutes
Review by Mike Szymanski
I love movies that take place in storage buildings. It’s truly one of the creepiest places to be: the lonely long corridors, the echoing of the footsteps down seemingly endless halls, the huge creaky elevators, and long lines of closed sliding doors that open into boxes of secrets that people have moved here because they don’t want to keep them at home.
Yes, there’s a genre of these kind of movies, and some of the scariest movie and TV scenes ever filmed take place right there in a storage unit.
This movie “Locked In” captures the best of the fears that people have about storage units and results in a cool chase movie with sudden twists and turns just like the storage building seems to have. What a fine debut for first-time director and writer Carlos V. Gutierrez, who manages to turn this claustrophobic venue into an entertaining cat-and-mouse thriller.
Of course nowadays the general public has become mostly familiar with these storage units thanks to the proliferation of “Storage Wars” shows where collectors bid on abandoned units and seek some sort of treasure inside.
But, it’s more than that, some of the most frightening secrets or greatest revealing moments crop up in shows like “Dexter,” “Breaking Bad,” and “Homeland,” and they all take place inside storage units. Most recently, secrets of a mom played by Toni Collette are found in a storage unit in the new thriller series “Pieces of Her.”
Movies such as “Storage,” “The Hoarder,” “Storage 24,” and “Self Storage” take place solely in these creepy buildings. One of the most frightening revelations in “Silence of the Lambs” was when Clarice finds out there’s a storage unit owned by Hannibal Lecter and she goes to check it out.
Such settings go way back in movie history. The climax of Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M” caught the child killer Petter Lorre in a storage building.
I became most familiar with the “Storage Horror Genre” in 2013 when interviewing director and writer Patrick Hasson who actually lived in a storage building secretly in the San Fernando Valley and got to know others who did the same. He filmed the creepy horror film “Blood Shed” with Bai Ling in the same building he once called home.
The best thing is that these structures are ready-made and don’t require too much set design to use for a movie. They are built as frightening, lonely and stark edifices, so it’s a perfect setting for a haunting, or killing, or secrets waiting to be revealed.
“Locked In” stars perpetually-beautiful actress Mean Suvari, best known for two very different movies, “American Beauty” and “American Pie.” In this, she plays a mom named Maggie who has a very checkered past but comes across as a somewhat religious woman whose husband is in jail. She is left somewhat reluctantly raising a 17-year-old daughter, but is struggling in every possible way. And, every guy in her life, from landlord to boss to co-worker, is perpetually hitting on her.
Her daughter named Tarin is played by young actress Jasper Polish, who you may not know right now, but she looks very much like Mena in her younger days. No doubt we will see a lot more of her in future films.
No one is who they seem to be at first in “Locked In,” and everyone is potentially someone to watch out for, because everyone gets underestimated.
Maggie (Suvari) works with a guy in the storage building that seems to be making illegal side deals, and he’s played by Jeff Fahey from “Lost.” Other recognizable character actors you will know from their many credits include Manny Perez (“Homeland”), Costas Mandylor (from the “Saw” movies), and Bruno Bichir (“Party of Five.”)
The movie kicks off with somewhere in town, two guys are robbing a jewelry store and drag a screaming clerk through the back alley. They then shoot her in the head as she runs away. Later, Maggie sees her co-worker on a camera in the storage building as he is making some kind of shady deal, and she finds a stash of a lot of cash.
With her daughter waiting in the car, Maggie gets captured by the jewelry thieves who think she knows where the stash is. Let the maze-like adventure begin.
Some of this may be predictable, but there are good heart-thumping moments, and some good surprising turns. The writer-director purposefully wanted to make a modern-day film noir that takes place in one night. It features a mom protecting her daughter, and major questions of ethics.
And no, I personally have not spent much time in those long corridors of creepy storage facilities. I can’t even remember the last time I’ve ever have gone into one.
But, I don’t have to go onto the top of a lighthouse, or down into a dark cave, or into a storage building, to know how scary and uneasy those places can be. Or to know how scary it would be to get “Locked In” one.
###
