Dir. Imran Naqvi , UK , 2010, 84 mins
Cast: Tamer Hassan, Simon Phillips, Danny Dyer
Review by Carol Allen
This is a promising first feature from director Naqvi and writer John Stanley.
The story is a somewhat well worn doomsday scenario, reminiscent of 28 Days later. A man in a suit, William (Philips), wakes up in a deserted City of London . He appears to be the only man left in the world, though there are no dead bodies lying around and there's still power – the escalators and traffic lights are working, though there is of course no traffic and indeed, no crashed cars. Eventually he finds he is not in fact alone, when he encounters six other survivors, including a gun toting soldier (Hassan), a drunken politician Robert ( Sebastian Street ) and a pretty young woman (Daisy Head). As they try to work out what has happened and why they are the only seven people left alive, the connections between them gradually emerge through brief but ever clearer flashbacks. Meanwhile they are being pursued by a predator (Dyer), who is picking them off one by one.
It's an intriguing story, very nicely filmed by cinematographer David Mackie, particularly in his atmospheric treatment of the deserted city. The characters are a bit cliché but Philips and Head are good and Dyer effectively chilling as a bloody and blindfolded Angel of Death figure, though some of the other acting is a bit unsteady. There are also a few anomalies, such as William fruitlessly attempting to make a phone call from a call box – what, no mobile? – and in the fact that it appears to have been raining in some of the deserted city streets and not others. One gets the feeling that this was shot on a low budget with severe time constraints. It does though appear to have been made with determination and dedication and despite its derivative nature and occasional lapses into amateurism, there's something appealingly sincere about it. It will be interesting to see what Naqvi and Stanley can achieve next given a bigger budget. |
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