A Disappointing Continuation

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I happened to come across Alarm last week just on account of actor Aidan Turner's current popularity, having never heard of this film before. A very good one, pity it was not promoted more actively though, I guess no one outside Ireland or probably Britain - like I am - has ever heard of it.I do not think this is the kind of film that can reach out to everyone though. Not much for a young audience anyway. The protagonist's post-traumatic stress or a burn-out is one part of the drama. She has no rare condition, she is not a freak, she is a common girl in a vulnerable state, like so many others. Though, it seems, at the wrong place, time and company. Or are they wrong really? The other part of the suspense is brought about by a very subtle development of events that keeps you tense from the start to the end. One has to be observant as nothing is served ready. At some points you might need to revise all your original hypotheses. I needed to watch it twice to get some things clear. The end is neither open nor illogical, contrary to what some comments say.Apart from the plot, it is the acting that makes this film. Everyone in the cast delivered a great performance. Nothing was too much or out of place, under the circumstances of the plot. I loved it all!A few words about the picture quality. I am not sure if it was intentional or not that some indoors scenes were too dark - some found it unskillful of the cameraman. But I thought it was just right for this story. It felt more like the viewer was lead to empathize with the characters' emotional state of mind rather than to scrutinize certain technicalities.

Molly (Ruth Bradley) leaves city of Dlin for a more quiet suburban area following the horrific death of her father. She buys a home and that's when things start falling apart. Her close friends, an older couple, Jessica and Frank, with whom she's been living, want her to stay with them, but she feels the need to be on her own. After ahousewarming party with Dublin friends, she meets Mal (the eminently sexy and watchable Aidan Turner) who offers to paint and decorate her new home so she can meet work deadlines. They quickly fall into bed, he moves in with her, but not before her new house is broken into and strafed by an unknown burglar. The police aren't much help, but the local hardware store owner insists she should have an alarm system put in. Still the break-ins continue. Mal gives her a guard dog, Scruffy - a cute mixed breed who is protective of her, and warns off anyone who tries to get in. Under unexplained circumstances, Scruffy gets loose, runs away, and then Molly begins to suspect everyone she knows of being the burglar,and trying to drive her mad. Mal, Jessica, Frank, her psychiatrist, the hardware store owner and his twin who installed the alarm system - she trusts none of them. By the end of the film - by the way with NO resolution - it's unclear if anyone she suspects is guilty, or if she indeed is having a mental breakdown. My reaction at the end - oh, for F**k sake!! Nudity, intense love scenes (with Aidan Turner there are bound to be!), intense drama or melodrama - a "keep you on the edge of your chair" film that keeps you riveted to the end - a "who dunnit" that doesn't resolve "who dunnit". Love films like this, many won't or don't, but it is a very good film, well paced, good characters, I give it 5 stars, regardless of the unresolved ending.

While the acting is decent, the lighting of too many scenes is poorly done and too dark. This makes watching these scenes distracting. For a film that focuses on one house you would think the director would have spent plenty of time showing you the whole house and the surrounding neighborhood. Instead you frustratingly see the same inside-outside shots as if the front porch, the master bedroom and the main foyer is all that exists. This does not add to the suspense it just makes it annoying as you cannot judge how far she really is from anything else.Apparently the director and writer have never lived in the suburbs as they attempted to paint them as some sort of caricature of what they are really like. In the United States I have lived my whole life in the suburbs, in six different homes, in three different states and not one was remotely like the abandoned ghost town they tried to create in this movie. I kept laughing as I watched them literally try to make living in the suburbs some sort of "scary" ordeal, please. Only someone who insanely hates the suburbs and refers to the homes as "McMansions" would like this movie. Those who hate the suburbs usually have never lived there and/or are environmentalists who falsely believe suburbia to be some sort of problem. Not realizing those who move there choose to of their own free will and do so for legitimate reasons. In Ireland I suspect the recent flight to the suburbs is a new development (no pun intended) as the U.S. went through this change after WWII. For those who choose to live there, the suburbs are a higher quality of life compared to urban living.As for the plot it is monotonous (over two hours) with the ending not really resolving anything. The whole time you have the naive main character (Molly) making stupid mistake after stupid mistake while ridiculously trusting a worthless alarm and anyone who gives her advice. After the first break in, I would have gotten an alarm with cameras, more secure doors, a dog and a gun (Thank you second amendment!) not wait around to be a victim like Molly. Do yourself a favor and watch something else.

By now, whether we've been to Ireland or not, we know from the cinema that the suburbs are adrift with identikit mcmansions. Cynical Irish dramatist Gerard Stembridge chooses this locale to place an intriguing parable of trauma and the disassociation and neurosis that results from it.On the surface, "Alarm" looks like an almost banal mystery: Molly, having been the victim of a home invasion that resulted in her father's death, moves out to said suburbs to "get away" from the madness and regain her life. She throws herself into a ready-made relationship with an old school flame who she runs into at her housewarming. Almost immediately after occupying the chic new place, break-ins start occurring. Benign at first, then gradually becoming more aggressive, repetitive and sinister. They're not random, the cops surmise...there's something "personal" going on. A vendetta perhaps.Quite possibly, considering Molly stole the house from another interested party at the eleventh hour, paying a premium to a slimy real estate broker who turns up beaten to a pulp days later. Or is it her new beau, who seems to appear and vanish at all the right moments? Or even the two elderly friends of her father, who took Molly in after her dad's murder, and now can't bear to see her go? All this is really secondary, however, to what Stembridge may be getting at: as much as Molly wants to start over, she seems trapped in a maze of neurosis and contradictions between what she wants and her idealistic picture of what she thinks she should want. She wants interaction with others on her own terms and then isolation and anonymity when it's not convenient. She's the perfect tenant for suburban zombie-ville but doesn't want to admit it.Stembridge and Ruth Bradley and Aiden Turner (as Molly and her hunky Irish stallion Mal) do an effective job at ratcheting up the tension and offering a virtually hopeless situation: the alarm Molly eventually is backed into purchasing (she resists it a long while for the Reality and bad memories it symbolizes) becomes as much an instrument of torture as the break-ins themselves, an almost Pavlovian realization of her instability. The level of hysteria and helplessness in these sequences reminded me favorably of John Carpenter's strongly affecting TV suspenser "Someone's Watching Me" from 1978.The ending to Alarm is going to irritate a vast majority of viewers who aren't looking at it in any other terms but a whodunit. The real puzzle Stembridge seems to be presenting here, though, is not Who Done It but What It Truly Implies About Us To Whom It's Been Done.