Spring must definitely be in the air these days… because suddenly everyone’s front list seems friskier and riskier than they've been in recent memory. Is there a reason for this, or is it just a fluke of timing? Start-ups like the new Pink Eiga DVD label may have timed their launches to the departure of the Bush administration, I'm not sure. Or is it simply that audiences these days are looking for new forms of escapism?

In any case, let’s take a look at as many of these interesting titles as possible: there’s actually so many that we’ll need to return in April for a second helping. From their very diversity, though, they demonstrate how over-determined human sexuality in fact is, that is resists reduction even as each audience member—each person—must still delimit it somehow in order to bend it to critical analysis.

Walled In (Release Date: March 17)

This film doesn’t just lead with star Mischa Barton’s sex appeal in terms of marketing, but foregrounds it dramatically, and in ways both expected and unexpected. Moreover, and somewhat surprisingly, the film puts gender roles near the top of the issues it explores. No, Walled In is not a borderline exploitation flick à la the execrable Captivity. Nor is it your standard woman-in-jeopardy thriller (which may be one of its problems, actually). Instead, Walled In starts off, and sustains for a remarkably long time, the atmosphere of a classic Gothic mystery, albeit with strong horror overtones, updated strikingly for today. The reason I emphasize the Gothic over the horror is that for most of the movie, there's no identifiable “monster” and no victims either, except in the remote past. Of course by Gothic I don’t mean “goth,” but rather the lit-based romantic convention of having a young female character arrive at a weird, “old, dark house” full of shadowy family secrets. It should come as no surprise, then, that Walled In was originally a novel by Serge Brussolo and is also debuting as a graphic novel this season.

But back to Barton, our point-of-view character for virtually every scene of the movie. An engineer specializing in structural demolitions, she works for a family firm called, significantly, “Walczak & Sons”; significantly because the surname underscores the film’s title and main theme, and the “& Sons” serves to highlight that she is a woman working in what is a traditionally male job. Sporting a masculine first name, “Sam,” she is forced to endure numerous comments from sources both male and female to the effect that she’s somehow perverse for not being more feminine in terms of appearance and vocation. The narrow-minded, slightly dim male lead, a teen played by Cameron Bright, suggests early on that because she dresses “like a guy” she must be a lesbian (although he uses a different term). Her reply: “Well, you get straight to the point.”

The evasiveness of Sam’s initial response (she eventually affirms her hetero status) speaks to a deeper ambivalence on the part of the character.

While determined not to let sexism distract her from doing her job, which entails diagnosing the weak points of a creepy apartment complex in the middle of nowhere for implosion, she also apparently needs to conform to others’ gender/sexual expectations of her in order to do that job… or even just to survive. After she learns that Bright’s character, Jimmy, has been spying on her—in the bath, no less—her highly unnatural reaction seems to be, “No big deal, just don’t do it again.” At another point she has Jimmy attend to a cut on her bare leg while she reclines on a bed, then seems oddly (almost disingenuously) surprised when he responds to the sexual possibility of the situation by tentatively caressing her. Much later in the movie, when she is a captive of the villain in what’s essentially a deep pit, she removes her top in a crude attempt to win her freedom (i.e., “You can have all this if you let me out of here”). The subtext throughout, then, is that Sam represses, or “walls off” her own feminine sexuality, and does so at a cost. Of course this cost is dramatically enacted by those evil forces that would exploit her sexuality when she’s in peril—she’s forced to dance with and kiss a fellow captive at one point, as if to prove that she can conform and act like a “girl” should. (And check out the clip at the end of this page, in which she’s forced to examine her own sexuality in a symbol-laden sequence complete with menstrual imagery.)

So it’s hard to decide whether the film’s sexual politics are reactionary or progressive—like many genre films, it tries to have things both ways. It should be noted that in its strange climax Sam's fate is determined not by actions that she takes, but by another character responding to what’s apparently a kind of psychic call. Is this film a female empowerment flick, then, or simply an allegory about women being put in their place? Probably neither, actually, as Walled In seems to split the difference at every turn.

The script’s missteps occur in the second half, when the Poe-flavored spatial metaphors of psychological repression give way to rather standard, and sometimes sub-standard, thriller conventions. There are one or two attempts at major plot twists, but these revelations don’t really lead to anything as compelling as the story’s initial set-up. In short, as a gripping text of pure entertainment, Walled In is a let-down in several ways; on the other hand, as a gripping work of subtext, there’s more to sink one teeth’s into here than half a dozen other genre movies.