THE PROTAGONIST of Alarmis a young woman who turns increasingly paranoid after she buys a house on the outskirts of Dublin.
ALARM **
Directed by Gerard Stembrige. Starring Ruth Bradley, Aidan Turner, Tom Hickey, Anita Reeves, Owen Roe, Emmet Bergin 15A cert, lim release, 103 min
Played with conviction by Ruth Bradley, Molly is still traumatised after an incident at her family home a year earlier, when intruders killed her father.
Molly escapes the cacophony of city traffic for the virtual silence of her new home on an estate that is deserted during the day because everyone else leaves early for their jobs in Dublin. There Molly becomes understandably unhinged by a series of creepy events that force her to install the alarm that gives the movie its title. Aidan Turner engagingly plays the amorous young man she comes to regard as her protector.
In the film, Molly works from home as a researcher on a radio arts programme. This provides writer- director Gerard Stembridge with an opportunity for an amusingly sly dig when he feeds one character the line that she's reading books so that the show's presenter can pretend to have read them. He also targets the Irish property obsession of recent years in Alarm, which is the dark flipside of his charming Celtic Tiger romantic comedy, About Adam(2000).
Writing in this newspaper last Saturday, Stembridge noted that the ideas for his Alarm screenplay were formed after he was the victim of a burglary at his own home, and by his dismay at the proliferation of "particularly ugly brand-new enclaves of houses" in this country.
In the same article Stembridge provided an entertaining, healthily cynical dissection of the mechanics of the thriller genre in movies down the decades. It is all the more disappointing, then, that the consequences in Alarmare not as compelling as its premise, and curiously lacking in the tension that permeated Stembridge's unsettling first cinema feature, the 1995 domestic-violence drama, Guiltrip.
