Blackout

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with a woman lying dead in the bathtub, having slit her wrists. It then moves on to show Karl (Aiden Gillen) at his wife's graveside, where his sister in law brings his daughter to see him. Karl asks her to keep his daughter for another day while he sorts out his apartment. He then leaves, and is shown driving down the road, where he receives a phonecall from the hospital, asking him if he would be able to come in and help with a patient. He declines, stating that he has something important to do for his daughter.Claudia (Amber Tamblyn) is shown at the hospital, worried about her grandmother's condition. A doctor appears and tells her that her grandmother has survived the surgery, but is old, so it is only a matter of time. Claudia leaves the hospital and gets on a bus.Tommy (Armie Hammer) is shown getting out of bed, where he wraps a bandage over his bruised knuckles. The woman sleeping beside him is bruised too. He gets on his motorbike and leaves.Karl pulls up at his apartment building and helps some elderly women leave the building. As he holds the door open, Claudia walks in and waits for the elevator to come. When it comes, the pair enter it, and the doors start to close, just as Tommy pushes the door open. Karl warns him about doing it, telling him that sometimes it can go wrong and cut people's arms off. As the lift is moving upwards, it gets stuck between floors, and all three begin to panic because they have somewhere to be. During this, Karl takes a photo of Tommy, but Tommy makes him delete it, causing an argument, where Karl punches Tommy, and Claudia has to break them up.A series of flashbacks then shows the reasons why everyone wants to get out early. Claudia is shown with her grandmother, who tells her that she isn't fun anymore, and that they should go and do something exciting. She realises that she is devoting too much time to work, and not enough to her social life, so she agrees to go to the beach. On the way, Claudia is stopped by a homeless man, but her grandmother carries on walking, and is involved in a car accident. After she wakes from her operation, she tells Claudia to go and fetch a photo of her husband so he can be near her when she passes. Claudia leaves to fetch the photo, and needs to get out in order to give it to her grandmother.Karl is shown taking a photo of a woman in a club. He begins talking to her and invites her to his house. He then drugs her, before carving marks into her chest. After this, he covers his body in salt and rapes her, before killing her. He leaves the mess in his apartment, and needs to get out in order to clean it up.Tommy is shown with his girlfriend Francesca, who is concerned he is just using her. Later that night, her father comes home drunk, and she tells him to leave in case he is caught, As Tommy is sneaking out, her father catches him, and she tries to calm him down, so he hits her.Tommy manages to knock him out, and tells Francesca that he wants to run away with her. She gives him her father's money and he goes home to retrieve some from his father's stash. He needs to get out in order to get the money.Back in the elevator, the three of them realise that due to the building being renovated, and people going on holiday, they are the only ones inside. Tommy pulls out a knife, and manages to wedge the doors open, but they are trapped between floors so they cannot escape. He decides to climb out, but as he is climbing to the next floor, the cable snaps, and he falls on to the elevator, which is now only held on by its emergency brakes. He climbs back in and they realise he has broken his leg.The three of them decide that someone should stay awake in case help comes to them. Claudia pulls a chocolate bar from her bag and Karl confiscates it from her, as well as taking her inhaler. This causes her to become agitated when he is smoking. During all of this, Francesca arrives and sees Tommy's bike outside. As she gets in, she realises no one is in, and is about to leave when she hears shouting. She decides to leave anyway, and returns home.While Claudia sleeps, Karl tells Tommy if they don't get out before his daughter gets there, he will kill Tommy and rape Claudia. Later on, he tells her that he has a plan to set the fire alarm off, if she climbs up and puts his lighter against the sensor, and if she fails, he will kill them both. He gives her inhaler back, and she climbs up, only to fall short of breath. She attempts to use her inhaler again but drops it down the shaft. She presses the lighter against the sensor, but cannot reach properly and falls on to the elevator, which has now become extremely vulnerable.She re-enters and Karl tells her he warned her what would happen, and he stabs Tommy to death. He goes to attack Claudia, but the elevator begins to fall towards an exit. He stabs her, but she climbs out into the corridor. He pulls himself out and starts wildly stabbing her, but she kicks him and he falls into the elevator, which drops to the bottom of the shaft and crashes. She then has an asthma attack.The next scene shows paramedics taking Claudia, and the girl from Tommy's apartment away, with Karl's daughter and sister in law in the police car. Claudia wakes up in the hospital, where the doctor who she spoke to earlier tells her that her grandmother didn't make it.

Tags: psychedelic, murder, claustrophobic, flashback

Review:
The best thing about the movie is that you don't know what's going to happen next - unlike the rubbish, yawn inducing "thriller" Lakeview Terrace.
Not the best film of its type, but still quite a good watch, but more of that later, here's a brief synopsis.Three people board an elevator in an old apartment building.
We are told in flashback the events that led these three to be on this elevator and it makes for some interesting revelations, especially when we discover one particularly gruesome secret that makes one of them very dangerous.
Decent performances from the entire main cast, so honourable mentions go to Amber Tamblyn as Claudia, Aidan Gillen as Karl, Armie Hammer as Tommy and Katie Stuart as Francesca.This version has a running time of only 82 minutes which, I felt, was just right.
What happens next is flashbacks of their live and the reason why they want to get out of the elevator as soon as possible.
Overall the movie was a nice surprise to see, can't understand why some people say it was boring..
Three characters are trapped overnight in a stalled elevator, bickering and bitching as they try and find a way out while thinking back to the sequence of events that led them there.
It's clear that Mexican director Castaneda is influenced more by the character driven horror of the sixties and seventies than by vapid eighties slashers, but his interest in people shouldn't be mistaken for squeamishness when it comes to ugly sexual violence - it's been a long time since I wanted to see a bad guy get what he deserves as much as I did watching 'Blackout'.
A terrible script made it impossible for me to like this movie.The movie is about three people who are stuck in an elevator.
You could see the director put time and effort in the making of this movie.The first minutes looked promising but then something changed.
It wasn't what I expected of this movie and there was almost no real suspense till near the end.The dialogue is cloggy a lot of the times and interesting some of the times.
I read the first comments, wonder if his screenplays have been roundly rejected, or what his ax to grind is.the movie's use of flash backs was quite good, the casting was superb visually, beautiful women.
BLACKOUT is another low budget B-movie thriller with bags of potential but little thought process gone into the execution.
Thus this is a film that looks cheap throughout, and which becomes boring not long after you start watching.
This is because the whole movie is padded out with flashbacks to explore the characters of the three people trapped in the lift, flashbacks which add little except to increase the running time.Cast-wise, the film is in firm hands with the presence of Aidan Gillen (GAME OF THRONES), but sadly the actors can't do a lot with what are relatively one dimensional characters.
For a better trapped-in-a-lift movie, check out ELEVATOR..
One of the great things about having access to Netflix's "Watch Instantly" feature is that (of course) you can watch movies without having to wait on a disc to arrive via snail mail.Sometimes you'll stumble across unexpected gems that come in the form of obscure indie films.
My experience, however, has been that I usually end up being suckered into movies that are a complete waste of time.
Enter Blackout, a low-budget psychological horror/thriller from director Rigoberto Castaneda (yeah, I'd never heard of him either).The story is this: a trio of strangers becomes trapped in an elevator when a citywide power outage cripples Los Angeles.
What's especially dire about this group's situation is that their apartment building is undergoing heavy renovations, which means that there are only a handful of tenants who could possibly hear their cries for help.If you're like me, this sounds like a brilliantly simple setup that could only result in a great horror movie.
My first thought was that days of existing in a dark elevator would expose the occupants' inner demons, which would accompany a chilling set of primal instincts that were triggered because of being forced into an extreme survival scenario (this drummed up thoughts of films like The Descent and Cube).Unfortunately, I was quickly reminded of the other elements that comprise "good" movies.
You know, things like an engaging narrative and characters that I actually care about.As you've no doubt guessed by the categorization of this critique, none of these things are found in Blackout.
I mean, this is the kind of thing a director would want to do because—if done correctly—it would create a sense of claustrophobia, which would be entirely appropriate given the nature of a movie about a group of people stuck in an elevator.Oddly enough, this is a very well-lighted movie.
It's not until the very end that shadows seem to envelop the doomed elevator, and even then the proceedings are entirely too bright.What starts off as film built on a great premise quickly descends into the worst sort of horror fare: the boring sort.
And, to confirm such fears, for not one minute of its 85 does this film offer one moment of suspense, one glimmer of shrewd writing, one ounce of meaningful plot development or a single second of entertainment.The plot concerns three people who become trapped in a lift, and whilst trying to battle their way out, they soon begin battling each other.
Unfortunately, not soon enough, as almost the entire film is spent flashing back through the characters' histories, building up completely pointless back-stories in the hope of an emotional climax that never comes to fruition.Following the remarkably ridiculous serial-killer twist that finally emerges, one can't help wondering which is more painful: 20 hours in a lift with a madman, or an hour and a half in front of this trash.
Lacking a storyline, it must be difficult to develop a movie...Add poor acting to an incredibly poor screenplay and the result is 'Blackout'...The entire storyline of this movie could have (should have) been a single scene within a real movie...
I'm not sure what the point to this movie was ...or if it even tried to have one, except perhaps that even semi-ordinary people can be horrible human beings...Three losers get stuck on a rickety old elevator and one is a murderous a-hole, while the other two are simply uncaring jerks...This one's not even worth a watch on TV...Just a poor, long, drawn-out scene that literally 'goes nowhere'...(except down)...Avoid this one...just wait on the next one...it would have to be better than this....
It should be said that the stage was set up for a potentially great thriller here; three strangers trapped in an elevator during a blackout, one of which is carrying a deadly secret.So why am I rating "Blackout" a mere four out of ten stars?
The audience were given a series of random flashbacks to each character, but these just told why the people were in the elevator, not adding any layers to whom they were, except for the killer.The acting in "Blackout" was adequate, but Aidan Gillen was carrying the majority of the movie with his performance.
You might actually say that this was his movie singlehandedly."Blackout" ended up as a below average thriller, which was a shame because it really did have potential to be so much more..
This is one of those movies you find by accident and are happy you decided to watch it despite it's low rating - proving once again that IMDb ratings are not very enlightening :) Great acting all round, very well directed with a tight and tense plot that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
I liked the camera work and the fact that it wasn't all shot in the dark so you could see the characters expressions etc.
Ignore the bad reviews (and the cheapish titles sequence which almost stopped me watching any further - luckily I decided to give it a bit more time).
This was another movie that Neflix had listed under Horror films so I figured I would watch it.
It isn't that it wasn't good at all it's that I didn't really care for the characters.
I give "Blackout" a 5 out of 10~Joe. Good movie.
I saw Blackout (IV) (2008) this morning, not to be confused withfhe other movie( Blackout (2008) Director: Jukka-Pekka Siili).This Blackout (2008) was Director: Rigoberto Castañeda!Three people from different walks of life, find themselves trapped inside a stalled elevator.
What at first seems like an inconvenience rapidly escalates into a nightmare.I enjoyed the movie Devil, which came out two years after this movie, I thought I would enjoy this movie as well and I did !It was really good movies (it's not a horror movie at all but more of a Thriller ), this movie is really entertaining and really good, as some intense moments and the acting from short cast was surprisingly good, much better then i thought they would be.The Downside of the movie.The First half movie was really well made, it was tad realistic but second half movie went in slightly different way, which change the tone of the movie a bit.
which I did not like at all.And the end, had some really Poor CGI effects (which don't normal bother me), in this movie, its just looks total out of place.
There are a few movies about being trapped in an elevator and this is one that managed to keep me interested.
Don't waste your time with this film.Films that take place in a short amount of time and confined location are interesting to me so the idea of people trapped in an elevator with a serial killer sounded attractive but this film could not keep my attention.
Quite a good horror movie....
This was a good horror movie with a lot of suspense at times.
Three strangers are trapped inside an elevator in an empty apartment building during a blackout.
"Blackout" is an effective low-budget thriller with a tense and scary story.
The plot is uncomfortable despite most of the story happening in one location with flashbacks of the lives of the three characters.
The movie picks up dramatically after the first 10 minutes or so and it is gripping to the very end.I love the look and feel of this movie -- very dark and mysterious with great background music.
From the time the principal characters get stuck in the elevator, the movie cuts to flashbacks of the lives of these characters in a very effective fashion.
The cinematography is excellent, especially in the elevator, the elevator shaft and the rest of the apartment building.(Potential spoiler, but probably not:) The only goof I saw was that the elevator shaft was apparently much longer than the building was tall, but this is very small in comparison with the overall quality of the movie.Another reviewer expressed surprise at the relatively low rating of this movie on IMDb, and I have to agree -- it deserves much better than the current rating of 5.1 stars.9 stars out of 10..
Well, the movie has not the best script ever, but comes from a nice plot that develops the tension in a very stylish way.
**SPOILERS** The no-goods: a first scene in a graveyard with a bad acting Karl.
The idea that Tommy is a dangerous character dies in the first 20 minutes and the danger from Karl comes late in the film.
The end inside of the elevator with the thing crashing on his head with horrible VFX, strange, cause the rest of the film has very nice visuals.
I'm not quite sure what the purpose of a film like this, and in other reviews I've taken moral exception to misogynistic violence gloatingly filmed, but I found this both convincing and, and its penultimate minutes, viscerally frightening, and in the end, perhaps that authentic terror is all the justification that's needed.I don't think I need to introduce spoilers here (even though the film doesn't really rely on twists as such, even though a couple of false trails are laid), so I'll just say vaguely that the gradual disintegration and revelation of character is well handled and paced by the scriptwriter and effectively portrayed by all three main actors.
Now if the majority of the film is going to be set in a gloomy lift, then a good screenplay with structive characters and story will be vital to keep the audience hooked.
Not very interesting i know .your probably getting bored reading this review, but not more bored than u would watching this movie.
There nothing interesting to say about it,so what you expect.Three people stuck in a lift, two die, but who cares who dies , and that it, complete boredom.
Possible spoilers I wont bore you with a synopsis of this film, there's enough of that in other reviews.I found this movie pointless by a key factor: the characters, in a plot in which three characters are forcibly secluded, is obvious they have to be interesting to make the movie work, here it isn't the case.
First the choice for our trio of protagonists is random and inconsequential, they don't complement, mirror or oppose each other in any way, they're bland, all of them young, good-looking, with some feeble drama on the background, and most importantly, there are no stakes at all, there is no challenge to overcome, and the stuff that happens to stop the elevator feels forced and unnatural,mind you that I know nothing of elevators but it simply doesn't pull me into the narrative, and it is completely unbelievable that for hours no one enters the building and notice the elevator doesn't work.
The photography and music is enjoyable, but adds little to the emotions of the main idea, The abundant flashbacks that supposedly serve to introduce and develop the characters, fail to connect with the main plot line and are too generic to be of interest.
Overall the movie lacks focus or intent, three characters with secrets get stuck in an elevator- one of them a murderer- so what?..
This movie was supposed to be a thriller with little horror/crime elements but instead they tried to make it into an artistic melodramatic cinema and that's where it failed miserably.
The moot point is there was nothing much interesting happening throughout the entire film.
The filmmakers tried to give us a sense of character development through flashbacks but instead of cutting to the chase halfway through, the flashbacks continued right till the end which killed the pacing in my opinion.
I kept saying to myself, can we please get back to the present, all the while looking at my watch for the movie to end.The main problem of the movie is the three main characters.
The whole part about the doctor seducing the women and subsequently cutting her up and raping her was like poetry in motion which completely ruined the movie given the fact that it aimed to be a thriller right from the get go.
The atmospheric tension was sadly missing from the entire film given it's highly volatile nature.There still might be folks willing to sit through this garbage and for them I would like to stay clear of any further spoilers in my review.
I am a big fan of Horror/Thriller genre and can easily sit through anything remotely interesting but I found myself looking at my watch every 5 minutes when I watched this one.Thanks for reading..
Three people with places to be end up in an elevator in a blackout.
Really well made film, it has some dynamite visuals, is undone by uneven acting (Amber Tamblyn is hot and cold) and a plot that really makes no sense no matter which way you look at it (The bricked up elevator shaft makes no sense no matter how you explain it).
The character we see at the beginning, at the graveyard, is the bad guy, and only near the end we watch him as well.
Great sequence.And when the lead actress - don't know her name - is evacuated on the stretcher, the camera shot reminds me Al Pacino, in the slow motion manner, at the end of CARLITO'S WAY, another De Palma's film.
I'm not sure about the film's title being a good choice, but this horror thriller enters Creep-like territory taking an ordinary situation you would find yourself, and turning it on its head.
Basically three strangers with different backgrounds and reasons to be somewhere enter an ordinary elevator in a building under a little construction, and it ends up stalling.
As the hours pass by they are all getting concerned that no-one knows they are trapped and coming to help them, so they do try everything they can to get out or attention.
Signs is a film I can think of that is a little ruined with flashbacks placed in tense scenes, but I can make exceptions.
The flashbacks of Gillen's sinister character, especially the torture scene with cutting and salt combined with rape, is horrific viewing, but that just makes it all the more watchable, I was surprised I liked it actually on instinct.
Blackout (2007)  This was a pretty average thriller, which saw three very different personalities get trapped in a lift together at an abandoned apartment block.
a little hit and miss bad still a good film (contains small spoiler).
there are some good things about this film like the flash backs which build really help you get to know the characters and also help to break up the film as unlike Phone booth I don't believe this film would have worked as just being set in the same confined space for over an hour.
Now for the bad points the amount of time that they were stuck in the lift was a little unrealistic and ending also seemed a little bit rushed.
Overall though a good film and an OK way to pass some spare time you might have.