Just saw the film "Fired" starring Rahul Bose, a directorial debut by Sajit Warrier, who has outdone M Night Shyamalan's masterpiece "Sixth Sense". The entire film is set in a two hour period , inside a corporate office, with only Rahul Bose and his imagination/hallucinations as cast. In that regards it is reminiscent of the Hitchcock classic "The Rope" where the entire film was set in a single room (of course, with the added bonus that it was shot in a single take!) Warrier has used sound (whispers, eerie background music) and light (shadows, steam, strobes) to create an experience that had me on the edge of my seat at 3 in the afternoon (I would probably have declined to watch it at night)
The storyline has Bose as a successful desi corporate fast tracker who has just fired a boat load of people in the London office of an Indian company, and established himself in the CEO position (the only weak point of the story - what would he do as CEO with no staff?) Anyway, the fun starts as he is wrapping up his day and getting ready to go home - things start to "happen" in the office, he starts seeing and hearing things, most spooky of which are some "encounters" with a former colleague with whom he was having an affair. Sitting in his plush chair, surrounded by his iMac and fancy gadgets, Bose's mind, fueled by alcohol and some pills, leads him down a path of increasing insanity, where he can no longer tell what is real and what is imaginary. The presence of a CCTV makes the audience aware of the reality - there is nothing there, he is holding a knife and activating a fire extinguisher to fight off a figment of his imagination. While the imagery is quite clever, the real effect comes from watching Bose alternate from panic to relief to terror. Filming this must have been interesting, I wonder whether there were some points in time where he actually began to believe the plot of the story.
Psychological thrillers have always been difficult to pull off - it is far easier to show blood and gore, aliens and vampires evoke a visceral reaction that has been exploited quite well in cinema of recent times. But the subtle hint, the whole "twilight zone" type plot where one has to stretch one's belief in reality, is the most powerful of all. One can only imagine what is must really be like to succumb to "mind games". I'm not going to be staying late in the office anytime soon!
The storyline has Bose as a successful desi corporate fast tracker who has just fired a boat load of people in the London office of an Indian company, and established himself in the CEO position (the only weak point of the story - what would he do as CEO with no staff?) Anyway, the fun starts as he is wrapping up his day and getting ready to go home - things start to "happen" in the office, he starts seeing and hearing things, most spooky of which are some "encounters" with a former colleague with whom he was having an affair. Sitting in his plush chair, surrounded by his iMac and fancy gadgets, Bose's mind, fueled by alcohol and some pills, leads him down a path of increasing insanity, where he can no longer tell what is real and what is imaginary. The presence of a CCTV makes the audience aware of the reality - there is nothing there, he is holding a knife and activating a fire extinguisher to fight off a figment of his imagination. While the imagery is quite clever, the real effect comes from watching Bose alternate from panic to relief to terror. Filming this must have been interesting, I wonder whether there were some points in time where he actually began to believe the plot of the story.
Psychological thrillers have always been difficult to pull off - it is far easier to show blood and gore, aliens and vampires evoke a visceral reaction that has been exploited quite well in cinema of recent times. But the subtle hint, the whole "twilight zone" type plot where one has to stretch one's belief in reality, is the most powerful of all. One can only imagine what is must really be like to succumb to "mind games". I'm not going to be staying late in the office anytime soon!
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