Await Further Instructions

Await Further Instructions

The sci-fi film “Await Further Instructions” is a good idea: The British working class family Milgram have Christmas dinner together after years of estrangement, but don’t get to enjoy their pudding because they’re trapped inside their suburban home by an unknown entity that only speaks to them through the television. All the windows and doors are sealed from the outside. Cell phones and computers won’t work. The TV is their only link to what’s happening out there and it demands the increasingly terrified Milgrams do exactly as it says.

But director Johnny Kevorkian and screenwriter Gavin Williams don’t just squander their Beanstalk-high concept; they also fail to make anything in their drama work on a scene to scene basis. So what starts as fable ends up an unintelligible parable about how xenophobia paved the road to Brexit (true) and media-engineered mass brainwashing (huh?).

Or, put another way: “Await Further Instructions” begins like one of Rod Serling’s wry, mind bending half-hour morality plays for “The Twilight Zone,” then devolves into an underlit feature-length episode of Forest Whitaker’s unsuccessful 2002-03 revival of “The Twilight Zone.”

Given that Williams’ stagey scenario is also a polemic about what’s wrong with modern society, comparisons between “Await Further Instructions” and Serling’s classic anthology series are tempting. There are other surface similarities particularly the movie’s real time style pacing and single-location setting but the biggest one is Williams’ and Kevorkian’s unadorned, flat style of dramaturgy.

Just listen to how these characters talk at each other: They’re one-dimensional foils, each designed to reflect its counterpart’s defining ideology back at itself until both break or at least bend beyond recognition. This wasn’t so much a problem when Serling was writing most episodes of “The Twilight Zone” because he, as the series’ creator and most frequent/involved writer, excelled at dialogue (and monologue!) that had psychological depth, political insight and poetic rhythm.

But the members of the Milgram family only matter inasmuch as they reflect generalizations about their respective stock characters. It’s a domino effect: The family’s racist patriarch (David Bradley) butts heads with go along to get along authoritarian son Tony (Grant Masters), which puts extra pressure on Tony to silence any and all dissent from his prodigal son Nick (Sam Gittins) and Nick’s quasi-progressive girlfriend Annji (Neerja Naik).

Annji is barely even a character since all she does is stand up for herself whenever her skin color becomes a sticking point she’s not white, so Dad gets mad, which makes Annji sad/mad and Nick sad/mad and Tony extra-pissy. But Tony usually talks loudest, so we watch Naik and Gittins briefly stand up for themselves before quickly sitting right back down after Masters glowers/pouts at them.

That power dynamic tracks unfortunately but it doesn’t click into place when there’s no poetry to these characters’ dialogue or insight into who they are beyond their politics. Monotonous bickering is one thing; political proselytizing is another.

Thankfully, “Await Further Instructions” is compelling until its terrible ending that comes off more as a negative and rough morality tale about the pliability of people when their survival is hanging on (gulp) television. Almost immediately after receiving them, the Milgrams start following new orders of dehumanization with almost no pushback from anybody (yes, Annji and Nick do resist). Tony and his hothead son-in-law Scott (Kris Saddler) have moments of indecision, but they’re fleeting (and immaterial to the movie’s plot).

Fans of genre films will be interested in the fact that the Milgrams’ sinister antagonist is a boob tube. The TV in question does look kinda creepy in a few scenes especially one where Nick’s frail mother Beth (Abigail Cruttenden), who really should take better care of herself if she wants her pleas to be effective, begs it to spare the life of her pregnant daughter Kate (Holly Weston), who happens also to be racist.

Where “Await Further Instructions” completely falls apart is its last 20 minutes or so. By that point it no longer makes sense on a dramatic level nor a symbolic one. Their panic grows as their situation worsens toward catastrophic, but there’s nothing about the movie that makes that escalation feel genuinely urgent. The acting is uniformly flat, the lighting and cinematography are bland and unmemorable, and few lines stand out.

And most important: This go-for-broke black comedy doesn’t have anything coherent to say about society’s relationship with technology. A worthy topic doesn’t always equal an exciting satire/social critique and Kevorkian & Williams aren’t nearly wild enough hereabouts with their half-baked thoughts on TV as our dominant brainwasher for this thing to work. “Await Further Instructions” never quite gets right; still I’ll admit it I wanted it to stick the landing before watching it faceplant instead.

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