Smells Like the Plot is Leading the Character, Your Honour

Director: Michael Craft
Main Cast: Matt Scully, Damien Garvey, Saskia Burmeister, Robert Mammone

Storage is a perfect example of a talented director who shouldn’t write his own scripts. Michael Craft’s debut looks great, the murky storage facility and its inhabitants set up an alternate reality that has the potential to delve into the creepy territory that Fincher explored with ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Panic Room’. Unfortunately it gets stuck under its own plot and takes wild uninteresting stabs at originality.

DVD Release Date: 1st March 2010

Seven-year-old Jimmy (Matt Scully) is walking home with his father after seeing a re-run of his Dad’s favourite film ‘Death Wish’; a comparison that hints toward plot development but eventually doesn’t deliver, both films exist on totally different plains of fiction. Walking home a knife-wielding mugger attacks them, his father resists the mugger’s demands and he is stabbed lethally in the gut. At his father’s funeral Jimmy’s uncle, Leonard (Damien Garvey), tries to console the poor kid but he is riddled with anger and swears to kill the man responsible. 

Leonard takes Jimmy in and starts him working in his underground storage facility. Leonard has a lot of pride in the business, he gives his customers something they require, discretion. One woman uses her unit as a shrine to her deceased husband, another man is storing his furniture to avoid the bailiff’s, and Leonard is almost certain one guy is making crystal-meth in his.

The facility itself is simply a subterranean hangar, with rows and rows of sealed port-a-cabins; every corner looks the same as the last, and the droning ventilation unit stops the hangar from turning into an oven. The facility harbours the secrets of the clients and thus it holds the knowledge over the character, Craft’s camera glides along the repetitious corridors like a ghost, it hangs over Jimmy’s head in the stagnant office giving the facility a menacing gloom. His only entertainment is unreliable secretary, Zia (Saskia Burmeister), a flirtatious free-spirit whom Leonard is thinking of sacking.

Matt Scully has an uphill struggle that he doesn’t get to grips with. To begin with he doesn’t pass for 17, his actions in the movie are often spineless and cowardly, and he doesn’t progress beyond this. He is an incredibly passive character, inarticulate even, and Scully seems to forget that to be verbally inarticulate often should make the character more transparent in their movements. But in fairness the character of Jimmy was a lame duck to begin with. Only in his suspicions of Francis (Robert Mammone) does he take control of the plot himself. 

Francis is a customer of the facility; Jimmy is walking by his unit when he hears hysterical mutterings and stifled sobbing. He sees Francis bent over on his knees holding a piece of cloth to his face (Blue Velvet anyone?). Francis is alerted to Jimmy’s presence, he is a furiously paranoid man, indignant in the privacy he is supposed to have as a paying customer. From here Jimmy begins investigating Francis’ records, using Zia’s superior knowledge of the facility to help him check CCTV footage and break into the units.

Unfortunately for Jimmy, and for the film, is that the moment his suspicions of Francis begin to prove correct the plot provides little involvement as a viewer. By not supplying a hero Storage doesn’t come up with anything original and falls short of its promise.

Country of Origin: Australia
Running Time: 90 mins
Certificate: 15