FILM
THE GATEWAY ★★
(M) Selected cinemas (90 minutes)
To be drawn to the idea of parallel universes, you don't have to be a particular fan of science fiction. All of us are capable of wondering what our lives might look like if things had turned out just a bit differently.
Jacqueline McKenzie in The Gateway.
Photo: Filmscope Entertainment
The Gateway, from enterprising Western Australian writer-director-producer John V. Soto, has a intriguing plot hook. Jane (Jacqueline McKenzie) is a widowed physicist who travels to a universe where her husband Matt (Myles Pollard) is still alive.
Logically (if hastily), she brings the new Matt home with her and installs him in place of the old one. But despite appearances, is he someone she ought to trust?
This could have been a starting point to explore the psychological gap between Australian men and women via a magic-realist spin on the “marriage thriller”. But anybody with such hopes will be disappointed.
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Soto's characterisation is purely functional and his actors seem to have received little or no direction (this sometimes creates an uncanny effect, as when Jane explains the situation to her teenage children while they stare at her blankly).
Nor does the film succeed as a more abstract kind of sci-fi puzzle. There are a couple of twists, but the ending is such an anti-climax that the real mystery is how Soto and co-writer Michael White thought they could get away with it.
Jacqueline McKenzie and Myles Pollard.
Photo: Filmscope Entertainment
If The Gateway can be recommended to anyone, it's to buffs with a cultivated taste for Z-grade, bare-bones filmmaking (the scenes in Jane's laboratory, for instance, look as if they were shot out the back of an office supplies shop).
This is not entirely a matter of “so bad it's good”. At their best, Soto's stark, simplified widescreen compositions recall the great genre director John Carpenter, and there's a minor thrill in seeing this deliberately minimal style applied to the blandness of Perth suburbia.
In his own way, it's clear Soto cares about cinema. Where The Gateway is concerned, however, he should really look at selling the remake rights.
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