Before I'm Dead

A man who has locked himself in his apartment after a tragedy begins to question the truth of his reality in this mind-bending psychological thriller.

It is no fault of "Before I'm Dead" that it is the second movie I've seen this week about someone locked inside an apartment for the entire runtime, after the excellent "The Djinn," or that there is yet another, "The Woman in the Window" starring Amy Adams, coming out this same week.

Agoraphobia is a real thing, especially after most of us have been partial or total shut-ins for much of the last year. So it's only natural that filmmakers have isolation on their minds, or are constricted by how they can still make movies with small casts and proscribed locations.

It's an interesting, occasionally intriguing, sometimes trying psychological thriller directed by J.R. Sawyers, who also stars and co-wrote the screenplay with Jessica Hill. He plays Nolan, a young man who locked himself in his home two months ago after a terrible tragedy involving his wife, Carla (Camille Montgomery).

The only person he talks to regularly is his therapist, Diane (Denise Boutte), who he chats with via video call. She genuinely seems to want to help Nolan, though how much he wants to help himself is less clear. He's smart but also stubborn and self-deluding, somehow believing that he's physically incapable of leaving the cramped apartment, even to open the sliding glass door to the tiny balcony.

Part of this is the fact that he sees the ghost (memory? projection?) of Carla in the apartment, and they have long, intimate conversations about her being gone and how he should move forward with his life. Camille, who is all smiles and sunshine, is helpful and not haunting. She urges him to go out and get on. But part of him feels she will stop appearing to him when he does, so healing is on hold.

Things get increasingly weirder, and even supernatural. Nolan experiences a major earthquake, though when he talks to others about it they remember no such event. He also starts to see other figures in the apartment including, terrifyingly, his own dead body lying in the bathtub.

He begins to suspect that there is some otherworldly or metaphysically profound event going on. He has conversations with another familiar figure, possibly malevolent, and experience time loops that he can't break out of. The locus seems to be his bathroom, where objects or even people seem to disappear, or show up differently if viewed through his phone camera rather than the naked eye.

"Before I'm Dead" isn't a long movie, but the more I experienced convinced me this would have worked better as an extended short film than a feature. The scenes between Nolan and Carla have a vibrant poignancy, while other interactions -- such as with a loopy downstairs neighbor (Gary J. Klavans) who keeps pounding on the ceiling with a broom handle, claiming he's there's a party up there -- quickly drag.

There are some good ideas in here, but they are not always thought out completely or executed well.

For example, at times Nolan opens the door to his magic bathroom and sees scenes from a previous time, such as one year ago or 19 years ago or 543 years ago. Except Sawyers actually puts up titles on the screen saying "one year ago," "19 years ago," and so on. I kept thinking, who is this information for? Is Nolan actually seeing the time stamps himself? Or is this just supposed to help us, the audience? If he doesn't know how long ago what he's seeing happened, how would we?

There is some playfulness here, as several times it is repeated that "this isn't a movie" or something like that. But of course it's a movie, because I watched it and I definitely know I'm here. Though I'm not so sure about you...