Bharat Nalluri's 'Downtime' is a curiously assembled film; one part social realism to one part disaster movie. It combines a portrayal of working class life (albeit a very extreme depiction) with a sequence of thriller-style life-or-death moments; between them, the film's characters face death not just through the incident which is the film's centrepiece, a lift failure, but also through suicide, asthma, a potential shooting and two separate fires. Structurally, the film is also odd, as the lift-based story occupies the bulk of the film, but a further dramatic incident (by no means a necessary continuation) ensures that the conclusion links only weakly to what has gone before. But there are some pluses. Some of the scenes are shot very effectively (one made me physically wince), and Paul McGann and Susan Lynch play off each other nicely in the lead role (although another strange twist is that while Lynch's young son features in almost every scene, he appears to be virtually dumb, as he hardly speaks a line in the entire film). Nalluri is perhaps a director to watch on the basis of the talent he shows here; he just needs to work out what sort of movies he wants to make first.
Review of Downtime
