At first the film was called “Point of Death”. Why the name was changed is the question. But it does help to make the film’s development even more troubling, as does the pessimistic narrative delivered by lead actor David O’Hara. It is he who plays Alex, an influential businessman surrounded by his family: his wife Claudia and their daughter Anna. They live together in good and beautiful surroundings in a magnificent and expensive house in an unknown rural part of England.
Alex earns money in London. He rarely sees his family. completely devoting himself to the cause, which negatively affects his relationship with his wife and daughter.
Somehow, having arrived home earlier than usual, he suddenly discovers that inexplicable things are happening: a huge and terrible storm hits, which cuts off the family first from electricity, then deprives cellular communications, then changes the surrounding roads. Alex begins to see and hear what is not really there – dark ominous figures in the doorways, incomprehensible appearances of his daughter and wife, their dialogues … Relatives say strange and gloomy things and then appear and disappear whenever he turns his back to them .
In the second half of the movie, Alex takes Anna to the hospital along a missing road. There are even weirder things going on. Nurses and doctors do not react to the presence of Alex, and only a loud address from the businessman makes them pay attention to him. Dirty walls, uncomfortable and untidy rooms, all this creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and desolation.
Horrors are few or none at all. In the end, Alex becomes ill and finds himself in a shaky world of illusions, where the main one is a doctor who explains to him that his daughter has long and incurable cancer and has been in their hospital for several months. Alex is sure that he recently talked with his daughter not in the hospital and asks to meet with Anna.
The doctor allows him and the businessman goes to his daughter, who still assures him that she loves her daddy and he is not to blame for anything. That they came not for her, but for him. She asks him to remember their country house, where they were happy. Alex remembers a nice little summer house by the lake. He is in despair – his daughter seems to be dying. Alex unconsciously breaks the bottle and picks up the shard…
The meaning of the film
This is rather a mystical film that should be perceived not in dynamics, but rather as a philosophical parable and where everyone discovers something of their own, unique. In which strange things happen, where everything is not quite what it seems, where there is an atmosphere of paranoia and tension.
Although the film’s budget to date is quite modest by today’s standards, the visuals are realistic and colorful: the storm looks deadly and dangerous, and the falling darkness and strange figures increase fear factors.
The skill of the actors in this tape is ambiguous. Obviously, there is no mutual understanding between Alex and his family, although this works for the future and shows Alex’s isolation from family life and his priority of work over relations with relatives. Alex is shown in this film as both a grim and confused figure, going from annoyance to bewilderment and back again as the world spins around him and leaves him to fend for himself.
Isabelle Allen suffers from the problem of young actors, as the dialogue she leads is simply not like what we might hear from the mouth of a child. Much of her delivery is trite and stereotypical, and while she may have been trying to look “creepy” in later scenes, that doesn’t really matter.
Claudia (Alex’s wife) is the most organically inscribed character in this complex and ambiguous picture. Her dialogue is mostly logical, although she speaks a little and to the point. In any case, there are almost no questions to her.
Movie ending explanation
Where is this “Point of Death” – “Point of Death”? Maybe the end of the movie will give the answer? Where Alex, upset by the impending death of his daughter, cuts his veins on his arm with a fragment of a bottle? On the verge of death, knowledge appears to him – Anna says it is not entirely clear and clear that they did not come for her, but for him, for Alex. Who’s come? Not disclosed. It means that Alex already knows who came …
Maybe the “death point” was three months earlier, when his daughter is admitted to the hospital with cancer?
