Saturday Night

Tramway, Glasgow
4 stars
To suggest Vanishing Point's latest peep through the windows of the
human soul is a sequel to their international hit, Interiors, is to be
lulled into a false sense of security. The stylistic trappings of a
glass-fronted house in which people wordlessly interact may be the
same. This time out, however, director Matthew Lenton takes his cast of
six beyond everyday minutiae to produce something infinitely more
troubling.

It begins idyllically enough, as a young couple move into an empty
living room they'll soon turn into a home. Within seconds, it seems,
their space is invaded and their private world turned upside down, be
it by cloyingly intrusive neighbours, a sprung leak or faulty
electrics. As an old woman rocks in her chair upstairs, doors open of
their own volition. The wildlife documentaries and footage of the early
Apollo missions to the moon that play on the TV become someone's worst
fears made flesh. The astronaut who floats upstairs is as cuddly as
the toy polar bear that is a totem of the couple's love.

Lenton and his team have constructed an exquisitely realised meditation
on life and death. At its most comically absurd, the juxtaposition of
sound and image recalls episodes of Pink Panther or Charlie Brown
cartoons. At its darkest, with predatory creatures creeping in from the
wilderness and mortalities in every room, the eerie hiss of Mark
Melville's score helps make it look more like an ecologically inclined
take on Roman Polanski's psycho-drama, Repulsion. Somewhere in-between,
a sense of loss pervades. In every dream home, it seems, there really
is a heartache, in a quietly compelling close-up of human nature, and a
whole lot more besides.

The Herald, October 10th 2011

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