Mark Reviews Movies: TIN CAN

Tin Can, Dread

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

The narrative of co-writer/director Seth A Smith's Tin Can isn't particularly deep or expansive. Most of it takes place in a tight canister or the sparse chamber that houses other containers like it. Meanwhile, a series of flashbacks, which gradually reveal the shared back story of its two main characters, don't illuminate much more than something one might see out of an especially dark episode of a soap opera. This isn't a film about its story, though, so let's ignore all of that for the time being.

Instead, Smith's futuristic tale is an exercise in thick atmosphere and mounting dread. The mood and setting are claustrophobic, as a woman tries to find out how and why she ended up in a tight container and hooked up to all sorts of medical equipment—all while she attempts to find a way to escape her enclosed prison.

As the puzzle of her circumstances gradually assembles itself, the terror here evolves from these specifics to something more existential. If Smith and co-screenwriter Darcy Spidle's story might not match the severity of its ideas, the tenor of this tale makes up for that obvious definciency.

A bit more than half of the story revolves around Fret (Anna Hopkins), a scientist researching a means of stopping a fungal infection that is spreading the globe. After making a breakthrough, she is attacked by unknown assailant, is knocked unconscious, and awakens inside a cramped capsule, with her body connected to a respirator, a feeding tube, and a catheter.

Disconnecting all of that and opening a vent inside the container, Fret learns that she's not alone. Her husband John (Simon Mutabazi) is in a neighboring canister, and other people are in capsules of their own. As the group tries to figure out what's going to happen to them (They have a pretty good idea, since the others volunteered for and/or helped design the process), some mysterious figures begin taking occupants away one by one to variously uncertain next steps.

The design of these devices and locales is simple. It's also efficiently discomforting in the way the filmmakers use light, its absence, the sterility of metal and machinery, and a growing awareness of the organic—the fungus and what's within those seemingly robotic workers—to unnerve us, both in what we know and what we come to learn. Smith's technique here is patient, with long takes and moments of ominous silence, and tantalizing in its elusive nature, particularly in the way he and cinematographer Kevin A. Fraser use close-ups to limit and obscure our perspective.

No, the story of Tin Can isn't much, as we're basically learning about some relationship melodrama before the relationship itself defines the bigger picture of what's really going on here and why. Those larger ideas, which deal with mortality and the human instinct to fight against it, do eventually put everything that's happening into a more broadly terrifying context about the cost of humanity's battle with death.

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