Arrowhead reveals itself to be the official water of the apocalypse in Right at Your Door, a little low-fi thriller of containment that has topicality and an indefatigable sense of manic claustrophobic energy on its side, but also a movie that eventually plateaus and runs out of interesting things to say, especially given our low-grade empathy with the characters.



The story centers on Brad (Rory Cochrane) and Lexi (Mary McCormack), a married couple living on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles. When multiple dirty bombs are detonated at various points across the city in a terrorist attack, spreading toxic ash to the winds, Brad is forced to act quickly in order to quarantine himself, which in the end means sealing his house shut before Lexi can return home. When she does return, she has a nasty cough, and though this gives Brad pause he still keeps her on the other side of glass and plastic, which . With the city under siege and martial law in effect, the couple — along with a random passerby sealed inside with Brad — try to piece together information from occasionally conflicting radio news reports and figure out their next move. They're not particularly soothed by the gun-toting, hazmat suit-clad scientist-soldiers, naturally.

Writer-director Chris Gorak has an interesting background in production design and art direction, and to this end his debut feature achieves a certain lean, muscular uniformity, even if I could do without a lot of Tom Richmond's affected, jittery cinematography, which comes across as a repetitive exercise in theatrical goosing. Gorak gets a lot of the small details of his conceit right, from the jumbled radio news reports (anchors and reporters stumbling over words, making misstatements and then correcting themselves) to the panicked uncertainty of Brad's decision-making. Part of the problem, though, is that though the characters are ostensibly tethered to one another, one is also free to roam about, meaning that when Lexi does just that, and returns with outlandish tales of the scope of the situation, it pulls viewers out of this particular story.

Cochrane and McCormack are also an odd-duck pair, which is perhaps part of the point, given that he's supposed to be a struggling musician who feels a bit emasculated by his professional wife going off to earn the proverbial bacon. Still, as constructed by Gorak, we don't get a particularly good feel for the background of their relationship, and when a tearful exchange with some legitimate depth of feeling occurs late in the film, with one character asking the other whose version of their first meeting and personal love story will live on as officially established fact, it only serves to underline the fact that we don't know a lot about these folks, or feel that passionately for them. A third-act, Twilight Zone-type reversal can't erase the fact that Right at Your Door, its achievement of limited means notwithstanding, works its way into a corner and then spends a lot of time dancing madly in place, all at one pace. (Roadside Attractions, R, 93 minutes)