Doors – An Overambitious and Meandering Sci-Fi Acid Trip

Imagine a world where one could access different realities of existence simply by walking through a door. As a concept, it’s not such a bad idea where many would surely imagine it to be something extremely frightening as well as quite unbelievable. But the plot of Doors meanders away into something more akin to a bad acid trip.

The opening sequence of Doors is actually the best part of this film, where a bunch of students are sitting in class when their phones start ringing consistently. The teacher has since disappeared after taking a private call that ended up being a warning from someone he knew. The kids eventually get hold of their locked away cellphones so they can answer their incoming calls. Basically, the world is now in a lockdown situation as nobody knows what is actually going on. Doors made of what looks like some alien material appear everywhere. We get the eeriness and the fear of the “unknown” vibe early on. But eventually, that dissipates into a feeling of boredom from a lacklustre movie that fails to deliver from the strong opening first segment.

Doors is separated into segments, but there’s no rhyme or reason for it, or at least not one that could be easily deduced although the “Lockdown” segment did make sense and served its purpose of introducing the alien threat to the audience. From there, the world is trying to make sense of what the doors are. Meanwhile, there were scenes of complete emptiness everywhere though it was probably a lot easier to film huge parts of a city block as empty during COVID. Nevertheless, the imagery is unsettling and sends an obvious message about what these mysterious doors have done to everyday normalcy.

In a weak attempt to find some sort of an explanation about the doors, Doors follows two principal characters during the “Knockers” segment who are part of a team that investigates the anomaly. These people are dressed in hazmat suits (or something similar), but other than that, they don’t seem to be afraid or even care about what has happened to the world. There is very little continuity between the different chapters and the characters. Perhaps the writers made it this way on purpose. Whether it was purposeful or not, it’s more distracting than anything else and does nothing for the story progression. Visually, however, the film is aesthetically appealing, particularly the shots of the empty cities, roads, parks and inner-city buses.

The performances of the cast vary. The kids in the first segment were great. They were believable, afraid, worried – all the things you imagine someone might be when an alien door appears out of nowhere. The following segment and the actors in it were all a little too carefree. For those who had been investigating the doors for some time after they first appeared, they should still at the very least be wary and concerned. These characters are acting like life is pretty normal when obviously, it’s far from it. And the final segment was just irritating.

Breaking up Doors into different segments may have looked like a good idea at first. But it works against the continuity and flow of the story being told. There are too many questions left unanswered from one segment to the next and very little explanation. A film has to give its audience something, even if its scraps. One can only keep guessing for so long.

While Doors attempts to traverse episodic storytelling, the pieces are way too dissimilar to make any sense. It is a different “story” each time in the sense that there are unique situations and characters. But audiences will still be left trying to figure out what happened in the first segment come the end of the film. This is a shame because the first segment was actually pretty solid.

still courtesy of Vortex Media

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