Alarm

Alarm is an Irish/Swedish production directed by experienced playwright and director Gerry Stembridge. Set in contemporary Ireland, with most of the action taking place in Dublin and an unnamed dormitory town, the film is in a certain sense “of it’s time”, because of the background of the booming property market, but also contains many elements that style it as a psychological thriller and, as such, is transferable to any time period. In common with many psychological thrillers, Alarm contains it’s fair share of red herrings, blind alleys and implausible characters and scenarios. What sets the film apart from successful films in the genre is that the script takes these liberties, which an audience knows it must grant to such films, and returns what amounts to a gratuituous and, crucially, unentertaining, delineation of the principal character’s psychological breakdown.

Principally, Alarm plays on our sense of home security, and envisages a nightmarish scenario of an individual’s manipulation by someone whom they have invited to share their home. The context for the film’s events is Dublin’s recent property boom, which saw a sprawling expansion of residential housing to the outer limit’s of the county boundaries. The idea of living in one such remote housing development appeals to Molly, the principal character, so much so in fact that she bursts into tears when an estate agent tells her that her intended purchase has already been sold. We should care for Molly and her fragile emotional state, but we don’t, and, as the story progresses towards the ultimately disappointing denouement, we become underwhelmed by an growing lack of atmosphere that rivals that of Molly’s housing development itself.

We are shown that the attractive and vivacious Molly’s only “family” are two elderly friends of her father, himself recently deceased as the result of a freak attack by drunken louts whom he had remonstrated with for urinating in his front garden. We meet her friends once at her housewarming party, and for the purposes of the script, we are led to believe that her suburban enclave is too far off the beaten track for them to visit more frequently. Unfortunately, this doesn’t discourage the attention of the mysterious Mal. Shortly after re-establishing contact with this old school acquaintance, Molly’s house is broken into and, not coincidentally as it turns out, Mal gets horny. Mal moves in with Molly, who has a phobia about house alarms because her father’s pealed in vain as he lay dying following his scuffle with the aforementioned drunken louts. However, the twin brother of the owner of the local hardware store turns up on her doorstep and changes her attitude, which has already softened due to a second break-in.

The new alarm alarm goes off almost every night but these disturbances don’t dampen Mal’s ardour, quite the opposite in fact. All the good loving in the world can’t stop Molly inexorably falling towards despair and she ultimately twigs Mal’s randy game and confronts him late at night, just the two of them in her isolated dream home. We all know that Molly isn’t being sensible here, but such confrontations are standard fare for thrillers. A further genre cliché is borrowed when Molly pushes the priapic Mal off the landing to his doom.

At the conclusion, Molly is over the edge herself, and we leave the unlucky girl repeating the phrase “It’s my home” while the local garda, her father’s friends, and others, gather on her porch, intent on breaking down her door to come to her aid. Not being in Molly’s predicament however, the audience make a swift exit and don't look back.

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