The Ones Below is a quick and easy psychodrama that’s as much about the trials and tribulations of apartment life as it is the interpersonal conspiracy that unfolds under the roof of a posh metropolitan two-flat. “In London, you never know your own neighbors,” observes the creepy guy from downstairs, and the film makes a convincing argument as to why that might not be such a bad thing. As if anticipating the comparison to films like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window, first-time director David Farr fills this neighbors-from-hell pregnancy chiller with hearty references to Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock. In particular, Farr borrows their fascination with transgression and the way paranoia infiltrates a domestic setting, which he expresses through probing camerawork and an appropriately suffocating atmosphere. But this story of maternal anxiety and neighborly distrust lacks a personal touch, not to mention the lurid spirit that makes its stylistic forebears so memorable.
The film is a psychological thriller through and through, though Farr seems more interested in the genre’s humanist underpinnings as opposed to its pulpy pleasures. The story contrasts the lives of two expectant mothers: the bubbling and glowing Theresa (Laura Birn) and the more hesitant and perhaps ambivalent Kate (Clémence Poésy). Kate lives upstairs with her husband of 10 years, Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore); Theresa occupies the first-floor unit with her much older husband, Jon (David Morrissey). During an awkward dinner in the upstairs apartment, Theresa reveals that she and Jon have been trying to conceive for nearly the amount of time that Kate and Justin have been together; meanwhile, Kate reveals that she wasn’t even sure she wanted to be a mother until very recently, much to Theresa’s shock and dismay. “And you got pregnant just like that?” she asks incredulously, snapping her fingers to emphasize the point.
The evening is thick with the uncomfortable air of people coming together more out of social obligation than neighborly goodwill, but things take a disastrous turn when Jon and Theresa lose their child in a tragic accident that could be loosely blamed on Kate and Justin. Farr exhibits a tremendous amount of patience in the story that unfolds, focusing on Kate’s troubled family history, pervasive self-doubt and maternal anxiety. You can find these themes in Polanski and Hitchcock, but they’re often buried beneath the colorful and sensationalistic characterizations. In The Ones Below, they’re out in the open, and consequently more self-serious; they feed the mounting tension that arises as Kate builds a healthy distrust of her downstairs neighbors, who become a more constant fixture in her life soon after she gives birth.
Farr builds suspense using Hitchcock’s visual syntax, bringing the viewer in by focusing on seemingly irrelevant details that emerge down the road as having grave importance. We enter Kate’s headspace through seemingly benign shots of milk bottles and baby monitors, and when the narrative unfolds to reveal the true depths of Jon and Theresa’s interest her new baby, we’re just as convinced of their duplicity as she is. But then it isn’t enough that the creepy people downstairs are merely the creepy people downstairs, and Farr introduces a number of plot twists that, despite taking certain liberties with regards to logic and believability, cast enough doubt to keep us in the dark until the legitimately shocking denouement.
The Ones Below doesn’t require a fine-toothed comb. The film’s narrative lapses and free-associative emotional breaks are what create its swirling anxieties and utter sense of displacement. Like Rosemary’s Baby, the film is a nightmare in the truest sense of the word. But therein lies the film’s most detrimental flaw: it so resembles Rosemary’s Baby—not to mention Rear Window, and, eventually, Vertigo—that it lacks a sense of self. However stylish and confident, The Ones Below best works best as a reminder of Polanski and Hitchcock’s enduring influence, and that one’s time, to put it one way, is better served watching the films that inspired the film, not necessarily the film itself.
The post The Ones Below appeared first on Spectrum Culture.
