Shelter

Great movie! Creepy, disturbing, lots of layers.
I found this interesting. It’s an interesting locked room scenario: 5 people end up locked in a fallout shelter on a random day and aren’t allowed to leave until a computer decides it is safe outside. The shelter is supplied with all their basic needs, including water, light, food for 2 years, and a garden kit. The story is about how these people interact and deal with the boredom and stress of being locked in a bunker together with no external stimulus. The story gets stranger when you start to learn the secret of the shelter. And it gets stranger still after you learn the other secrets of the shelter. The story isn’t just a survivor’s story, but the story of 5 people who believe they’re the last people on Earth and have to create their own society, learn the old world might still exist, they were under constant observation, and they might be accountable to a higher power for their actions.The movie is a bit hard to watch, because it jumps back and forth between the beginning of the lockdown and later periods after various tragic events have already occurred. You’re left to put the pieces together until you get to the reveal at the end. Clues to the passage of time including the computer countdown and changes to the bunker and the survivors as they add art to the walls, cut their hair, die off, etc. The survivors try to cope with their solitude in various ways, including ritualistic behaviors, made-up daily conversations, repetitive tasks, exercise, yoga, etc. Later, the survivors cope with the knowledge they are not alone and they may have to answer for what they did to survive. Later still, we get to see the survivors dealing with survivor’s guilt and the knowledge they were never really alone. Clearly, this is a well-thought story with a lot of aspects that make it worth watching and thinking about.One of the aspects of the film I enjoyed was the little changes as the survivors painted the walls, reserved their own safe corners, made playing cards out of the shelter manual, constructed whack-shacks out of their bunks, and customized their home over time. The shelter looked like they really spent that time in there. In a way, the tedium of their suffering was my tedium as I watched it. There was nothing very interesting about seeing them deal with the boredom of being captives underground, but I still enjoyed watching the story unfold and the reveals in the end of the movie made it all worth it. The reveal in the last quarter of the movie was fascinating. The further reveal at the end was disturbing.Another thing I liked was the way the camera jumped back and forth between the survivors’ interactions and the voyeuristic security camera-style. You’re experiencing the shelter with them some times, then spying on them others. At one point, you get a great shot of a survivor in an enclosed space from outside, showing a cross-section of the space they’re in. I thought that was a cool shot and worth mentioning.BTW-there are real studies to see what would happen to a person locked in a space; the effects of total deprivation from human contact, physical stimuli, lack of a day/night cycle, etc. The results are not pretty. I’ve heard 3 days of total sensory deprivation is sufficient to cause brain damage. The human brain doesn’t like sensory deprivation and will begin losing track of time and start hallucinating fairly quickly. This movie was an interesting exploration of what could happen to people who were locked in a shelter together for an uncertain period of time. It was also disturbing from the point of view of what happens when people are willing to conduct experiments on others without their consent or knowledge.I think it’s interesting this situation was actually triggered by the survivors closing and locking the door behind themselves when they entered, voluntarily confining themselves. Going off the final scene, I assume the paper sign triggered the completion of the experiment, and I think it was interesting the various subjects were finally free after the one survivor made their decision to embrace their confinement. I don’t know how far the experiment was intended to go, but survivor guilt played a big part of the events that occurred. If you’ve ever learned about the Stanford Prison experiment or the Milgram experiment, it’s obvious you can push people to do horrible, inhuman things to each other with very little prodding.So watch this movie!

The end dropped it down a notch for me
Things you won’t find in a bomb shelter:Handcuffs. Endless running water.Things you won’t do in a bomb shelter:Open a hatch and never look up. Not try the door. Leave the tap on. Ever. Garden without composting.Overall, I liked the movie. These little moments of absurdity are easy to get over. I found myself engaged with the characters. I love how they find their own space in the shelter. Brilliantly done. I’m even OK with the out-of-sequence delivery. I think it actually does cause the viewer to ask questions like “What happened to ____?” and pulls you into the story more. This is why there is no need to character develop any extensive back stories as some think.So the story unfolds in a non-linear way. predicting the real situation early on but I didn’t let that bother me either because the characters are engaging.My one complaint about the whole movie, and it is a big one, is that the last scene makes no sense to me whatsoever. We are to believe that guilt is more powerful than freedom. It is human nature to be free at any cost. I say no way on that outcome. This brings the movie down a notch from liked it to just ok.