By Keri O’Shea
If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to suffer from anxiety, there’s a fair chance that it’s also involved a degree of agoraphobia: after all, if people and unfamiliar situations fuck you up, then going out into the world where these things exist in spades is not likely to be a fun experience. With that in mind, meet Charlie (Tom Maguire). Charlie finds it next to impossible to get outside his own front door, and the attentions of his friendly, pretty neighbour Molly (Grace Kelley) might be tempting, but agoraphobia is as agoraphobia does. It’s only when he finds out that Molly is moving on that he feels a real impetus to do something, even despite himself. Part of this is out of a genuine, warm interest in her, but there’s a level of expediency to it too. After all, if he never gets out, how is he ever going to meet anyone? Even when she asks him out, he can’t shake his hesitancy.
Things are about to get worse for him though…
Just like Nicky, the last short film we featured here at the site (which is reviewed here), Unlocking Charlie focuses very much upon the plight of one man. It’s never easy to translate the experience of anxiety onto the screen – because it is such a personal, such an internalised state – but director Stephen Crilly manages to communicate something of it here without reverting to simply filming someone obviously hyperventilating for five minutes. He does this with the help of a decent performance by Maguire (who is, incidentally, easy on the eye, which never hurts) and the generation of genuine characters in there too, as you do feel for Charlie – and for Molly, who is only halfway to understanding what is going on with her neighbour and as such, feels hurt by the rejection neither of them can help.
So far then so good – but thus far, horror hasn’t figured too highly in proceedings. Unlocking Charlie does throw a curveball in there, though, utilising the tried-and-tested horror trope of the doppelgänger in an understated way, but one which adds an extra dimension to what’s evidently a crisis point in Charlie’s life. Light-touch it might be, but making Charlie the literal embodiment of the ‘own worst enemy’ idea is a nice touch and adds a new dimension to what would otherwise be a snippet of human drama.
Whilst Unlocking Charlie isn’t reinventing the format of the short film here, what it does do it does rather well in the as-ever limited time and budgetary constraints it has.
You can find the Facebook page for Unlocking Charlie here.