Alarm (2008)

People are voting emotionally.

A Masterpiece!

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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.

I rated it 2, but still, before seeing it, Netflix viewers gave it a little over 3 out of 5 and it was predicted it would be on a 2.9 scale out of 5 for me.But either way, I watched it, looking for a suspense film and hoping this would be it. It sadly is an extremely boring film with very, very little suspense. It is quite possibly more of a black comedy than anything, but boring at that. This movie, almost 2 hours long, really good have been made into a short movie, 30-45 minutes long and cut out the boredom. I understand how sometimes movie lag in certain points as there is plot development that must occur, however, the spans of nothingness in this movie were not filled with plot development, but instead filled with . . . well, nothingness.Acting in the movie was actually quite good and I think considering what they had to work with, nearly every actor in the film did a great job.There is certainly no thought provoking intellect at work in the storyline, the musical score was non-existent and the movie ends in a certain kind of humorous frustration at the waste that just occurred.Spare yourself on this one, read a few reviews and the watch the film in fast forward. You will get the gist of the movie and be better off.

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.