Film Review: Wired Shut (2021)
101 Films
(This review contains minor spoilers for the opening of the movie, and further spoilers beyond the warning.)
These reviews have been a bit of a dog show lately–the last five things I’ve covered have been middling-to-crap, and I’m glad to say that today we are breaking that streak: Wired Shut is a solid indie thriller that does just enough to climb from good to great, and I’m genuinely eager to write about it.
A Story in Silence
We open with a shut-in middle-aged author passing his time with whiskey, reading harsh reviews of his works, and struggling to return to any sort of productivity. Oh yeah, his jaw is wired shut, the skin painted with antiseptic, now freshly restored to a remarkable degree by the type of plastic surgeon only the wealthy can afford (if you don’t think there are lower tiers of such, look it up).
Our lonely opening character traps a spider in a glass, shifts his eyes to the nearly-blank Word document before him, escapes it in favor of an equally blank letter, and shortly moves on in favor of the decanter of lovely amber liquid in his bottom drawer. We have our protagonist, though he’s not a terribly sympathetic one so far. It’s a better opening than a lot of other films, and near the end of the scene we get a brief glimpse at the red-and-blue checkerboard that is his smile. It marks the horrors past, and presumably to come.
At some point, that intricate canvas of wires, bands and whatever else goes into fixing a catastrophic jaw injury is going to be ripped open, and I am here for it.
At this point there has been no dialogue, and further extended stretches of such leave the viewer tuned in, piecing together the character through context as he navigates his posh, ultra-modern home. Clearly he is commercially successful, but his writing career looks primed to lose steam based on what we’ve seen of his habits.
In time, we learn there was a car accident, and that this author is estranged from his family (thankfully the film dispenses or undermines all other clichés to come). It's a really solid opening, it’s great filmmaking and I’m optimistic. I love a director who can use silence this well.
Shattering all this is the arrival of his college-aged daughter, Emmy, an embittered twenty-something with a signposted passion for photography who definitely does have her powers of speech. She claims her mother sent her up there to visit–a claim the mother refutes via instant message a short time later–and we have the first gentle touch of the mystery about to unfold.
At this point, the film has created a lovely tension that feels ready to blossom. It’s a moody palette of blacks and blues over a minimalistic score, and there’s a vague aura of menace about both the author and his daughter. When a patio door is found open, and the power subsequently goes out, we know we’re about to raise the curtain on why this film fits into the horror-thriller genre.
Everything up to this point has been indie-perfect. When the fingers of an unknown third person creep around the edge of a door, we hold our breath. Our slowburner is about to catch fire.
I never spoil the latter portion of a film, and won’t in this case, but if you want to go in completely blind–my personal preference and recommendation–I suggest you stop reading until you’ve gone off to see the film for yourself.
Then come back to this article and share it with every person you know.
(this is the spoiler wall.)
The fingers creeping ‘round the aforementioned door belong to Emmy’s boyfriend, a handsome face we’ve seen in her photography, the two embrace and quickly reveal their plot to rob Emmy’s estranged father of the valuables in his safe.
While this itself isn’t anything new or unique, I appreciate that it immediately answers a number of questions we have as a viewer–why did Emmy come back to visit? Why did her story conflict with her mother’s? How did the patio door get left open? We also get new questions, like why does the clearly hyper-spoiled daughter of privilege need to rob her father who, twenty minutes ago, bought her a nine-thousand dollar camera lens on a whim?
We really should eat them, you know, the rich.
Prolonging Tension, Striking Balance, Googling French Translations
It quickly revealed that, though Emmy is odious, her boyfriend is the true villain of the film. He seems a bit too dullardly to justify the maliciousness he displays, pissing on boxes of books and whatnot, but I suppose this is intended to show just how unstable this man can be, and bridge to the things to come. His performance is more cringe than crazy, but I didn’t have too much trouble overlooking this minor issue in what has been an otherwise very solid film thus far.
We move on to a brief physical conflict wherein the author loses consciousness and wakes up tied to a chair, his daughter and her petit ami fou (that means crazy boyfriend in French).
From here the film enters a lovely cycle of presenting familiar thriller setpieces and immediately undermines virtually every one. Each time I felt my eyes wanting to roll in disappointment at the new turn the story had taken, I was almost immediately returned to the pleasant state of amusement I had felt from the opening credits. In addition to proceeding well and with a fine degree of originality, Wired Shut manages to keep things moving, never dragging out a chase or hide-and-seek for two minutes longer than it needs to. It’s a great accomplishment in indie horror, and I’m eager to see what the director does next.
Oh yeah–it gets ripped open.
Final verdict: 7/10
Strengths:
Cinematography and sound design
Solid acting overall
Undermines or inverts a number of thriller clichés
Weaknesses
Plot may seem flimsy if you ask too many ‘why’ questions
Main villain’s performance comes off a bit silly
Minor loose ends
You may also like: Hush, Misery
