Review by Darren Gaskell
Security guard Ben (Adrian Linke) is working a night shift at a warehouse when three people, intent on getting their hands on the contents of the safe, break into the building. As Ben considers how to tackle the intruders, he also has to deal with the spectre of his recent past coming back to haunt him. As matters escalate and loyalties are tested, who will survive the night?
Falko Jakobs’ micro-budgeted, noir-influenced thriller bounces back and forth in time as the plot plays out from various perspectives, revealing vital details about the past of the protagonists as the confrontation heads towards its potentially lethal conclusion. For those of us who bristle at the use of chapter headings, they are in place here, but in this case they serve a useful function in terms of breaking down the story into its component parts before hitting the fast forward button in order to bring us back into the present.
As well as being a decent little thriller, All Through The Hall (2022) serves as something of an instruction manual for those interested in making a feature film for little money. The bulk of the film takes place in one location, the cast is limited in numbers (Jakobs himself plays a supporting role) and a virtue is made of reusing footage. Arguably, some of the cat and mouse sequences are played out to the point where suspense is over-stretched but there are a couple of pleasing, if not entirely unexpected, twists which keeps the tale engaging.
Despite the tiny budget, there’s the odd burst of entertaining, competently staged action and some niftily edited violence, which elicits the requisite amount of wincing from the audience without having to show too much. For instance, the very sight of Ben deciding upon a hammer as his weapon of choice is likely to set folks on edge (or have horror fans rubbing their hands with glee), creating instant trepidation as to if or when it may be used.
While it doesn’t reconstruct the thriller template, All Through The Hall is an efficient time-flier which recalls, in passing, a smaller-scale Free Fire without that movie’s need for over-egging its characterisations. The protagonists here are believable, the scope of their dreams not especially extraordinary. The heist is commensurate with the scale of the overall piece, relying on a few relatively simple ways of breaching a building which isn’t exactly Fort Knox.
Similarly, the de facto hero figure which Linke portrays isn’t the wise-cracking, thief-taking, shoot first, ask questions later figure you’d get in an American spin on this kind of story. Ben is weary of coming up against criminals and just wants a quiet life, and his confrontations with his antagonists are shot through with an air of reluctance. His escapes from various situations are refreshingly unspectacular. One particular way out of a locked space is so droll, I snort laughed.
The final act plays out exactly as you’d expect, right up to the point where it doesn’t. Remember, this is a movie from Germany and, as a film industry which has Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s shadow hanging over it, there’s always room for doom, resulting in a darker – but still entirely fitting – denouement than the one that appears to be slotting into place. It’s a blunt slap of an ending which not everyone will enjoy, but it doesn’t feel unearned in the slightest, considering the various hints dropped at regular intervals.
Occasionally the performances wobble and there are a couple of flat spots which feel like padding to push the svelte runtime over seventy minutes, but All Through The Hall works hard to deliver its thrills with a smidge of invention. More often than not, it succeeds. The film itself, like its criminal element, ties up the loose ends and leaves few, if any, questions but a more general one for me would be: What would Falko Jakobs make with a sizeable budget? That’s an interesting one to ponder.
All Through The Hall (2022) played as part of the Spirit of Independence Festival in Sheffield, UK.