White Chamber is a 2019 thriller about a woman who wakes up in a blindingly white cuboid cell, captured and tortured for information.
We’ve been here before. Sort of. A character awakens in a small unfamiliar room, clueless as to why and who has taken them. From there, it’s about unraveling the mystery and discovering the truth, both about who is in the room and who is on the outside. So it is with Paul Raschid‘s latest film White Chamber, a curiously odd and compelling film that flirts with doing something different with the genre, though doesn’t have what it takes to go all the way.
We open in the titular white chamber, a woman named Ruth (Shauna Macdonald), an admin worker, waking alone and confused. A disembodied mechanical voice welcomes her, offers her a chocolate bar and probes her with questions. What we know so far though is that the British government has fallen under military dictatorship with a strong rebellion striking back. Her captor is General Zakarian (Oded Fehr), infamous for his ruthless rule, but wanting to know what she knows about the facility they are in, something she claims not to know. The room is handily equipped to dole out pain and so, he commits to do so to get answers before we flash back to five days prior, where things take a different spin.
We’re told it’s chaos in the streets, that the citizens have risen up as violence spreads, while through a small portal, Zakarian takes to heat, cold, electricity and more in trying to break Ruth down. At one point, she even fights another, one already succumbed to the primal instincts survival would undoubtedly unleash. What is this madness?
Thankfully, it’s the flashback that resets the film and helps much in putting things in order as everything we thought we knew from inside the chamber are tossed out the window as names and roles are well, I suppose that shouldn’t be spoiled. Raschid, who also wrote the screenplay, does best in creating and building that mystery, keeping secret enough of the plot as it unfolds to make it somewhat clever.
So, we’re meant to question who is good and who is bad and while that might have some legs for a while, the game becomes a bit tedious over its 90 minute run, though by no fault of the limited cast. Each are put through the ringer as the line between ‘testing’ and ‘torture’ become rather blurred, yet to be sure, there isn’t much momentum with the film set almost entirely within the chamber and a control center outside.
Still, the production value is pretty impressive and for those taken by the sciencey language that comprises much of the dialogue, it has some entertainment value. This is however, a small film that ultimately slips under its own weight, despite some earnest efforts from all involved. Indeed, many might not even really understand just exactly what is going on, the contrived last act and murky solutions not lending this much stability.