BREATHING ROOM

(A.k.a. A ROOM TO BREATHE)

Tonya (Aisla Marshall) is an attractive blonde who wakes in a darkened room. Dazed and confused, she scrambles around on the floor as the lights come up.

She's revealed to be in a large white room with thirteen other strangers. Some are dressed in orange boiler suits, the others in blue ones, with strange collars around their necks. Tonya asks what's going on - no-one knows how they got there, or why they're being held.

Above them, a sign reads "Getting started: Congratulations! You have been selected! Prepare for the experience of a lifetime! Players must follow all the rules to avoid penalty."

Tonya retires to a communal toilet adjoined to the white room and unpacks a parcel allocated to her. Inside it is her blue boiler suit, a photograph of herself and a Walkman with a cassette in it. Tonya plays the tape and a deep male voice tells her that she is player 14 - a very important role in the upcoming "game". The voice also informs her that only contestants without collars can break the rules. Alas, she is wearing one.

When Tonya returns to the room she finds the other contestants bickering about how best to escape. There is a door providing an assumed exit but they've been warned not to walk through it. One contestant decides to defy this instruction and steps through the door. His collar makes a zapping sound and he falls to the floor, the door slamming shut and locking behind him. Cripes.

The group now know that this situation is serious and begin to focus more on surviving their predicament. They absorb the various signs adorning the otherwise plain white walls, forbidding contestants to adjust their collars, step over certain lines and so on. Tonya surveys the group around her, watching as they speak.

We, with her, notice Harry (David Higlen), a bespectacled white middle-aged loser with an obtrusively inquisitive nature; Rothie (Eve Sigall), a haggard and neurotic wreck; weird Jesuit priest Charlie (Jeff Atik); and Lee (Brad Culver), the attractive Bruce Campbell wannabe who befriends Tonya and ultimately emerges as the voice of reason among the group.

We also discover that each contestant is carrying a hidden piece of paper, offering them a hint. For example, Lee's hint is to "place the pieces".

Just as Tonya makes inroads getting to know her roommates, their conversing is interrupted by a voiceover emanating from the ceiling: "The game will begin in one hour" …

When the game finally does start, a man appears on a video screen on the wall to warn them that they must obey the rules. The rules are kill or be killed, and only one person will win the ultimate prize: life!

Still unsure as to what is going on, but increasingly aware of their shared vulnerability, the group sit round and begin to tell each other things about themselves - their reasoning is that they need to learn enough to trust each other, if they are going to work together to get out of the room alive.

But before long the lights go out and panic sets in. When the lights come back on moments later, a fresh hint has been left on a table in the room ("Patience") and the group makes a nasty discovery.

As the game progresses the hints become more pertinent as they begin to make sense, and tensions become fraught as trusts are betrayed … and it becomes known that among the group are liars, rapists and murderers …

BREATHING ROOM is clearly a very low budget proposition and caters for its limitations by confining the action into one bare room. It keeps the action up-close and an air of claustrophobia is successfully developed.

The coloured boiler suits against the white backdrop are often a visually striking concept, one that occasionally echoes THX 1138 stylistically.

Although the budget is undeniably low, the performances are decent throughout. There's no obvious weak link in what is a competent if somewhat stagy delivery. The script is intelligent and at times thought-provoking, moving steadily towards a satisfactory twist finale.

Co-directors John Suits and Gabriel Cowan should be commended for at least taking a threadbare idea, applying the most economic treatment imaginable to it, and still keeping it watchable over the course of 90 minutes.

But Suits and Cowan are also responsible for the film's greatest flaw. The plot. There's not an ounce of originality here. It's impossible to watch this without thinking of AQUARIUM. Likewise, AQUARIUM itself couldn't escape the fact that it was shamelessly derivative of the likes of CUBE, SAW and MY LITTLE EYE. To name but three.

But whereas AQUARIUM floundered fatally in the final ten minutes with a bizarrely misjudged surprise climax, BREATHING ROOM at least stays true to its build-up and allows it's twist an ounce of plausibility. It also boasts its fair share of violence and grisly images.

DNC Entertainment's disc contains the uncut film in an anamorphic 1.78:1 transfer. The picture quality is of a good standard with strong definition and relatively muted colours.

The film is presented in English 2.0 audio and this is a well-balanced effort that plays without complaint.

A static scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 8 chapters.

The only extra on this disc is a 2-minute trailer presented in non-anamorphic 2.35:1.

Low budget horror that treads an overly familiar path in terms of premise, and it doesn't offer enough surprises to come away from that unharmed. Still, it may be worth a rent.

Review by Stuart Willis