Mark Reviews Movies: SAFER AT HOME

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 25, 2021

The general idea behind Safer at Home is sound. Here's a movie, filmed during the ongoing health crisis, that looks to have been made relatively safely, by way of the technology to which we've all had to become accustomed during the pandemic. The filmmakers should be commended for pulling off the production.

That's where the praise ends. Director Will Wernick may have figured out how to make a movie during a pandemic, with technology that reflects the way a lot of us have been living for almost a year now (He's not the first to do this, by the way, and he likely won't be the last, either). He and co-screenwriter Lia Bozonelis, though, don't seem to have worked out the many problems that could and do arise from this approach.

In this story, a group of seven friends, four living in close-enough proximity and the other three in different parts of the United States, are having a virtual birthday party for Evan (Dan J. Johnson) via a video chat program. It's September of 2022, and the novel corona virus has evolved. The infection rate and death toll around the world are climbing even faster than before. There are curfews, shelter-in-place orders, and police and military patrols enforcing these actions in cities everywhere.

This is a pretty cynical view (especially since an epilogue, which oddly doesn't get the timing of things right, suggests that all of this occurs despite measures currently being taken to reduce the effects and spread of the virus), but at least it's not front and center in this story. Anyway, the timing for this particular speculation about our collective future in the face of the global pandemic couldn't be worse.

That doom-and-gloom perspective, though, isn't the worst thing about this movie. Staging is, perhaps, the major issue. We watch four groups of video feeds—three couples and a single person—as Evan's virtual party unfolds. It's pretty dull, with Evan's girlfriend Jen (Jocelyn Hudon) getting into a lengthy dance-off with pal Liam (Daniel Robaire)—living with boyfriend Ben (Adwin Brown)—and some bickering about Oliver (Michael Kupisk)—living with girlfriend Mia (Emma Lahana)—mailing ecstasy for everyone to help the celebration.

The cameras are always on these characters, from the start, when Jen secretly tells friend Harper (Alisa Allapach) that she's pregnant, to the finish and everything in between in real time. Characters move their phones and laptops for no rational reason, such as when Liam brings it into the bathroom for a private conversation with Ben, simply because they have to notice when things go wrong.

Things do go wrong. Evan and Jen get into an argument. Jen falls, hits her head, and seems to be dead. Nobody thinks to call an ambulance until the body would start getting cold, and the idea is dismissed because of the pandemic (which will come as a surprise to anyone who has had or knows someone who has had an emergency situation within the past year). Accepting the morality of this shared decision is even tougher, since nobody is even certain if what happened was an accident.

Evan decides to run, and the friends try to help him evade the cops, navigate the road blocks, and find a safe place to hide. Evan records all of it, obviously, for the conventions of this story, but it's quite comical to notice how he holds the camera in such a way that we can't see the absence of the action he describes.

Without anything for every other character to do during all of this, we get a lot of shots of stunned open mouths, shocked gasps, and Oliver awkwardly leaning toward his cellphone while driving, which is the most unintentionally amusing bit among all of these accidentally funny reactions. There's a strange, voyeuristic undertone to the fact nobody logs off from the call, and considering how unhelpful most of these characters are for Evan and especially Jen, that feeling makes the whole mess even more discomforting.

Look, Wernick has a decent idea here from the theoretical and technical sides, but he's made a movie seemingly for the sole purpose that it could be done. The filmmakers definitely made a movie with a lot of limitations, and while we can forgive Safer at Home for those, there's no excusing the absence of thought that went into the specifics of this story and its staging.

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