A whip-smart Hibernian retooling of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, Gerard (About Adam) Stembridge’s new film is a fascinating muddle of paranoia and Hitchcockian menace. Ruth Bradley, the upcoming Irish actress, is convincingly fragile as Alarm’s tortured heroine, Molly. While recovering from a violent incident in which she and her father were attacked, Molly buys a house in a rural development far away from the urban turmoil and Celtic Tiger property prices of Dublin.
Her idyll is ruined by a series of burglaries and sinister happenings. Her new boyfriend (Aidan Turner) provides a much-needed shoulder to cry on but even he cannot alleviate her increasing sense of isolation in a place where commuters leave at dawn and return after dark.
Can her increasingly strange circumstances be entirely down to loneliness and heightened awareness or is someone really out to get her? Alarm leads us on a merry dance and gets the tricky stuff like plot and ambiguity right. If only the rest of the writing was so astute. The dialogue, though intended to be stylised, is too often comprised of deadened clichés and Things That People Never Say.
Most of Alarm’s problems, however, can be attributed to the difficult business of getting a film made in Ireland. The film’s social observations on overpriced housing and satellite communities are now hopelessly outmoded, presumably reflecting the temporal gap between the writing and the production. Budgetary constraints tell throughout: Mr. Stembridge is capable of innovative camera angles but, try as he might, he can’t make cinema on budget TV prices.
Worth a look just the same.