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Anthony Oberbeck’s directorial debut, Little Doors, is firmly planted in the absurdist suburban subgenre that Jesse Eisenberg has been quietly cultivating for the past few years, in that particular register where the apocalypse has technically already happened, but everyone still has to go to work, make meals, and have painful conversations with people. That’s arrogance. In a quiet apocalyptic world, a lonely woman named Sam (Megan Koester) discovers that a small wooden door has grown on her body, and the entire film hinges on whether or not she’s going to open it.
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What surprised me the most is how true the movie is to what the post-apocalypse would actually be like. Once the matters of survival are settled, most of life becomes mundane and boring again, and Little Doors leans towards this idea by the end, rather than treating the end of the world as an ongoing action. It’s slow to talk and it’s not a knock. It’s also the second film I’ve caught at this festival with Wes Anderson’s strong eye, all careful symmetry and muted color, and it suits the film’s hushed, dead register well.
There’s a trend running through several of this year’s Fantastic Fest selections that Little Doors fits nicely into, the kindness of patience with the odd at the heart of these stories. There’s a real tenderness here, a willingness to invest in a small, intimate narrative while the world outside feels huge and terrifying, and it just takes on real weight. Some of the imagery in this film, literally the world burning around these characters as they navigate something deeply personal, will resonate differently depending on where you look at it, and that seems intentional.
Koester carries the film’s emotional center, and he and Oberbeck, who also stars, are utterly committed and earnest, despite the film’s more distant surrealism. This is awkward cinema in the truest sense, full of long pauses and characters constantly on the verge of saying the wrong thing. “It’s okay. I don’t want you to worry” might be the funniest and saddest way to open a conversation I’ve heard in a movie all year. The world Oberbeck builds around Sam feels flat, like anyone else on a benzo, devoid of any real emotional range, which only complicates the film’s quieter human moments when they land.
The first act tackles something that is painfully familiar, the feeling that many of us have gotten over the past few years simply by keeping our heads down and doing right by the people closest to us. It is an emotional register on which small doors open, small, private, unglamorous cares in the face of something huge and unstoppable.
The door metaphor itself isn’t subtle, and the film doesn’t pretend otherwise. We all have locked doors that lead us, and Oberbeck knows exactly how blunt this image is, and uses it anyway, believing that blindness is part of it. There’s some clever visual grunt tucked in there, too. The door is about the size of a phone screen, and once you notice that, along with another character’s fixation on watching a girl dance through it, the film’s commentary on our relationship with screens becomes impossible to miss.
The back half of the film feels like someone’s first therapy session, with lots of self-discovery mixed in with lots of people honestly admitting they don’t know. It’s messier than the tightly controlled first half, but the mess feels more deserved than sloppy. The reveal and subsequent twist gives the film a real jolt of energy just when it needs it, breaking the film out of its hushed rhythms and into some real stakes.
This shift comes with a cost. The tone eventually turns to something less kind and gentle, and the climax becomes one of those movie moments that makes you feel bad just because it exists on screen and requires no elaborate staging. It seems that the key is to love the person in front of you for who they really are, not waiting for a hypothetical better version to emerge, which is a truly wonderful feeling. He also feels uncomfortable in this particular post-apocalyptic setting where no one remembers who they are or what they’re supposed to be doing.
Little Doors is a deeply disturbing little film that manages to do a huge amount with next to nothing, with a few actors, one house, one strange wooden door, and about eighty minutes to make you feel something you didn’t expect.
I watched the US premiere of Little Doors at Fantastic Fest, showing Monday, September 21 at 2:45pm at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar (Theatre 5). If you’re in Austin for the festival this year, come out and support these small and weird films, they’re exactly what Fantastic Fest does best. Tickets and full schedule live now.
Tyler has been Editor-in-Chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the director of Truman State University’s Monsters 101, a class that combines horror film criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he’s not watching, teaching, or thinking about horror, he’s the director of debate and forensics in Kansas City, Missouri.
