Jessica Nash lives on the farm of her late grandmother. She has gone through recovery for drug addiction and is trying to raise her young daughter Lainey and infant son Mason on her own. However, with no money, she now faces no choice but to have to abandon the farm. She enters the pantry in the house only for the brick propping the door open to slip out and trap her in there. As she tries to get Lainey’s help her get out, Rob, Jessica’s ex and the father of the children, arrives. He is high and takes great delight in nailing the door the pantry shut, trapping Jessica inside. He leaves but then his friend, the drug dealer Sammy, arrives with a paedophile interest in Lainey. Trapped in the pantry, Jessica desperately tries to get free and protect the children.
D.J. Caruso emerged as a tv director in the 1990s and made his film debut with The Salton Sea (2002), an excellent thriller where he demonstrated a sense of style that showed immense promise, even though the film never fully gained its due recognition. Subsequently, Caruso went on to make the likes of the serial killer thriller Taking Lives (2004), the gambling film Two for the Money (2005), the suburban paranoia thriller Disturbia (2007), the surveillance/amok A.I. film Eagle Eye (2008), the alien teenager film I Am Number Four (2011), the haunted house film The Disappointments Room (2016) and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage (2017). Most of these are utterly routine, where Caruso has demonstrated he is no more than a director for hire.
Shut In has an excellent premise for an Imprisonment Thriller. It is a variant on the one we had in Buried (2010) where Ryan Reynolds was locked in a coffin for the duration of the film. We have seen a number of variations on this in the ensuing years with the likes of Frozen (2010) with three characters trapped in mid-air aboard a ski chairlift; 247oF (2011) with characters trapped in a sauna; ATM (2012) with three people trapped in an ATM booth by a killer; both Detour (2013) and Curve (2015) with characters trapped in an SUV; Landmine Goes Click (2015) with a character trapped standing on a landmine; 200 Degrees (2017) in which Eric Balfour is trapped inside a heat kiln; Serpent (2017) with a couple trapped in a tent with a deadly snake; The Ledge (2022) with a girl trapped on a mountainside ledge by a killer; and Fall (2022) with two girls trapped atop a two thousand foot tv tower.
There are some very commendable aspects to Shut In. One of these is the fine performance from Rainey Qualley – the oldest daughter of Andie McDowall. Rainey shows her strengths in particular in the scenes talking with young daughter Luciana Vandette under the bottom gap of the door, trying to get her to do something to help them survive and protect herself.
Rainey Qualley imprisoned in a pantry
D.J. Caruso’s marshalling of suspense throughout is commendably effective – the film runs a fine rollercoaster particularly when it comes to the scenes of Rainey Qualley trying to get help from her daughter, or with Vincent Gallo’s paedophile trapped with his hand under the door and his taunts getting inside Rainey’s head. This makes Shut In into the best directed of Caruso’s films since The Salton Sea.
A thriller that uses domestic abuse as its subject matter treads a tricky line. There seems something dubious about works like Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) and in particular Enough (2002) where the abuse takes place in prettily photographed surroundings and the name actresses never manage to emerge from their brutalisation with anything more than a slight cut on their otherwise perfectly made up foreheads.
Shut In shares these exact same problems. This is most evident at the almost miraculous deus ex machina ending (and its heavy-handed Biblical allegory for cutting out bad fruit) that allows Rainey to turn her fortunes around in an instant, having overcome the figurative bad apple in her life, before the film goes out on wistful golden sunsets of apples being picked. You suspect that any film that directly confronted the realities of domestic abuse should be shot cinema verite style and show things with as raw effect as possible.
