In the Room Where He Waits review: Daniel Monks transfixes in this creepy chiller

It takes a remarkable actor to single-handedly captivate the audience. Even more so when the impersonal lines of a generic hotel room define their scene.

Wiradjuri star Joel Bray achieved this with his deeply personal live performance, Biladurang. Award-winning stage and screen star Daniel Monks also has what it takes, as highlighted by his towering role in director Timothy Despina Marshall’s chilling feature debut, In the room where he waits.

It features Perth-born, London-based Monks as Tobin ‘Tobi’ Wade, a stage actor who landed his first big Broadway gig as the juicy role of unreliable narrator Tom from Tennessee Williams’ The Haunting . Glass factory. But this glorious feat was overshadowed, first by Tobi’s breakup with her boyfriend, then almost derailed by a family tragedy that necessitated her return to Brisbane.

Languishing during two weeks of mandatory quarantine in a hotel room, Tobi’s first sobs glimpsed through the foggy shower curtain, his guttural sobs muffled by running water and the piercing laughter of the already unsettling, string-laden score by composer Joseph Twist.

He hasn’t told his irritable manager, Matthew (Anthony Brandon Wong), the truth about this relocation, feigning an escape to Los Angeles while rehearsals are forced on Zoom. A white lie kept by his best friend and Menagerie co-star Sienna (Annabel Marshall-Roth) in New York.

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Burdened with artistic anxieties in addition to a frayed heart, Tobi struggles to grasp his lines and the intricacies of Williams’ text while wrestling with the isolating realities of his position. Increasingly fearful of not being alone in this room that he cannot leave, he lets himself be trapped in a difficult story. Slamming violently into the mini-bar, his increasingly sweaty, sleep-deprived delirium conjures up monstrous suggestions from little more than dark doors and the silhouette of imposing security guards.

All of this is exacerbated by the presence of clothes left behind by a previous guest, the seemingly ordinary clothes owned by a Fabric-threat level.

The whole hotel room is a stage

As a film that embraces the theatrical form, Marshall’s surprisingly assured and psychologically unmoored spinechiller fully exploits Monk’s considerable talents.

Revealer in lead role in queer body-swap drama Impulse (2017), directed by Stevie Cruz-Martin from Monk’s own screenplay, he also appeared in Zak Efron’s light-hearted film Ricky Stanicky as well as the horror film by Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes on social networks, Sissy on the big screen.

He also proved himself on stage, in the lead role at Malthouse Theatre. The real and imaginary story of Elephant Manand in London’s West End – alongside Game Of Thrones star Emilia Clarke – in Chekov’s The Seagull, filmed for the National Theater Live series. Monks naturally understands how to capture the audience’s attention, whether from the tightly defined confines of a stage (a hotel room) or through the lens of a camera.

Delivering a truly magnetic performance, you can feel the raw authenticity of Tobi lashing out at Sienna as she tries to calm him down while juggling her fears closer to home during the chaos of the pandemic – props to Marshall-Roth for transmitting such supersized heat via small screens.

Susie Porter sublimely portrays Tobi’s overbearing mother through unintentionally heckled phone calls, with their brilliantly observed moments capturing how we instantly bristle at the parents’ well-meaning but ultimately vexing suggestions, like recommending that Tobi take a job as an usher at the local theater, rather than being an usher. actor.

Tobi’s time-wasting Grindr scrolling – “I need a distraction,” he tells Sienna. “It’s like a video game with hot guys” – expertly captures the toxic pitfalls of our smartphone-trapped lives. The often faceless torsos on the hookup app grid are ghouls who carry humiliating fears. It’s heartbreaking to see how Tobi, played by hemiplegic actor Monks, takes his topless photos from certain angles because he knows how he will be perceived by those who are cruelly vacuous and insidiously erode his buried insecurities.

A confession to his mother about why he stayed in a failing relationship for so long is also devastating.

Without missing a beat, Marshall’s screenplay, developed from a story co-conceived with Dimple Rajyaguru and Paradox Delilah, In the room where he waits it layers an immense amount of bitter and beautiful truths into its terrifyingly tense 83-minute frame, as Tobi finds himself confronted with dangers real and imagined.

The score that turns Twist’s knives, which cannot help but evoke Psychology Every time a shower curtain is pulled, it hurts deeply. Ben Cotgrove’s agile cinematography deftly slips into this claustrophobic space, exacerbating Tobi’s increasingly frenzied panic. Very few films with much larger budgets manage to create so much cinematic magic with such a simple setup.

“Time is the longest distance between two places,” says Tom from Tennessee, with Marshall and Monks working wonders in this cramped but strangely vast space where boundaries collapse, confronting Tobi with perhaps the scariest thing of all: what we are fleeing and the increasingly reduced space between here and there.

In the room where He Waits is presented at:

Sydney, Golden Age – June 12 and July 7.

Brisbane, Dendy – June 30.

Canberra, Dendy – July 7.