'Alarm' thick with menace

Director: Gerard Stembridge

Cast: Aidan Turner, Ruth Bradley, Tom Hickey, Owen Roe

Cert: 15

A film for all of us who work at home, often in housing estates that become deserted wastelands where the other residents have headed off to offices and workplaces to sample human contact.

Working at home can drive you to drooling madness, which is what faces journalist Bradley who feels the need to install an alarm and then to face the possibility that it’s the neighbours who are carrying out a series of break-ins.

Stembridge builds, deliberately, a slow-paced drama that’s thick with menace and unseen harm, though he might have got more from a promising plot had he upped the pace considerably.

Bradley, however, makes the film worth watching as she slides into the twilight zone. The old neighbourhood will never be quite the same again.

Star Rating: 4/5