Horror film “House of a Thousand Doors” by Mitesh Kumar Patel. Review

Mitesh Kumar Patel’s film “House of a Thousand Doors” (Woman in the Maze) is in theaters. Mood Mikhail Trofimenkov While watching this seemingly mystical thriller, I fluctuated between mortal boredom and hysterical fun.

Without realizing it, Mitesh Kumar Patel, in one of the episodes of his film, literally filmed a wonderful Russian joke about the “clairvoyant Antonina.” A potential client calls her after reading the advertisement and politely asks: “Excuse me, are you the clairvoyant Antonina?” – “Yes, Ivan Petrovich.” – “But I’m not Ivan Petrovich!” – “I know”.

So in “The House of a Thousand Doors,” real estate agent Gabby (Meredith Van Cake) is suddenly attacked by some crazy witch screaming in the genre: “Gabby, leave here immediately, or the gates of hell will open!” When asked how the witch knows the name of the heroine, she receives a reasonable answer: “I’m clairvoyant!”

“From here” where Gabby should be reeling in is the town of Jerome in Yavapai County, Arizona. As they say, America’s most famous ghost town. Of course, one can argue with this: anyone who has not been to Detroit, which resembles a victim of an atomic bomb and a street gang war at the same time, cannot judge ghost towns. Jerome, in a sense, was lucky. Yes, more than a hundred years ago it was a major industrial center: its mines produced huge amounts of not only copper, but also gold and silver. The population numbered—here sources differ—either five or fifteen thousand people.

As of 2016, there were 455 residents left. These souls, however, successfully monetized the tragedy of their hometown. Many tourists come to see its remains, including a former mine hostel-brothel decorated with wax mannequins of sex workers of yore. Presumably, after the release of “The House of a Thousand Doors” their number will increase.

However, given the unfortunate fate of Jerome, who looks quite presentable on screen, it’s not entirely clear what Gabby is catching there. Well, yes, some landlord urgently needs to get rid of his land plots due to legal prosecution hanging over him for financial tricks. And the views there are truly amazing. And the notorious house, in which that same thousand doors and which Gabby carelessly rented for a couple of nights, looks like your castle with stained glass windows, and not at all like the skeleton of its former splendor.

The first half of the film inspires some hope. Patel seems to draw on some of the aesthetics and mystique of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) days. Defiantly physical, if you don’t use the incorrect word “sexy,” Van Cake resembles the wild-hearted Lulu. Her colleague Owen (Joey Hayworth), who fell for her at first sight in a cowboy hat and became the girl’s Virgil according to Jerome, would also fit perfectly into the Lynchian universe. Another thing is that in Lynch, with his white-toothed, open face, he would probably turn out to be a psychopath, but in Patel he behaves quite like a knight. And he calmly swallows Gabby’s refusal to be intimate, motivated by the fact that she is supposedly frigid.

When it comes time to scare the audience, Patel demonstrates a complete professional disqualification. The only source of fear, apart from Gabby’s turbid nightmares, is that all the doors in the house slam shut and won’t let her out. As is customary in modern horror cinema, the girl wanders around the house, periodically squealing, jumping and screaming. And around her everything is grunting, rattling, throwing knives and other kitchen utensils. Owen and Sheriff Jessica Cooper (Missy Jane) are running around the house like crazy brooms, wondering how they can get into the mansion. Jessie, brandishing a pistol, for some reason doesn’t think of simply emptying it into the keyhole. But real heroes never look for easy ways. They don’t look and they don’t find.

It’s impossible not to note the film’s sad multiculturalism. Patel is the second Indian-American director in a month to have a horror film open domestically. He was preceded by Bishal Dutta with the film “The Conjuring.” The Evil Within”, against the backdrop of “House of a Thousand Doors”, seems almost like a masterpiece. In any case, there was at least one remarkable detail. A schoolgirl, subjected to a diabolical spell of ancient Indian spirits, carried with her a demon enclosed in a liter jar, like your pickled cucumber. Patel, disdaining national demonology, invades the territory of the American bigots and predictably loses to them.