Little Doors US première at Fantastic Fest, 21st Sept 2026
“While we continue to see cities erupt in chaos, violence escalate, the fabric of society break down,” intones the crackly distorted voice of a radio host (Frank Mosley) at the beginning of writer/director/editor Anthony Oberbeck’s Little Doors, “what we have to ask ourselves is, do we remember what it means to be human?”
As the host describes the abandonment of communities in a global apocalypse, and wonders aloud, “What happens to the people who are left behond?”, we see a woman (Megan Koestler) walking down the middle of an otherwise empty road, with smoke from burning buildings visible in the background. Dressed in utilitatrian blue overalls, with a cigarette held in her right hand, she does appear at least to be trying to remember her humanity. For every so often a minimal dance move is added to her step, and she forces her face into gurns, smiles and grimaces, as though donning a grotesque mask in rehearsal of normality. Back in the large, bare house where she is “more or less” squatting, she continues to practise facial expressions in the miror, while also discovering both an interior door that she is unable to open, and a large red cyst running down her side. For the former, she summons a locksmith (Oberbeck), also dressed in blue overalls – and despite the stilted nature of their conversation, he has soon moved in with her.
What follows is an autistic, exploratory courtship, as both try on the idea of keeping each other company and even declaring their love for each other, in a stylised dialogue where they echo one another’s words and mirror each other’s behaviours. She is reserved and repressed and not good at, or even interested in, expressing how she feels, whereas he is inquisitive and “trying to figure it all out” and overthinks everything and talks a lot. He dances goofily in front of her to overcome his self-cosnciousness and to break the ice between them, whereas she dances more coyly while he is sleeping. Their relationship is tentative and tender, and defined by an awkwardness that is entirely mutual – and between them they are negotiating who they are and what they want with, from and for each other. This is romance delivered with a blank face, devoid of any expressed passion, and stripped down, like the house, to its minimalist furnishings.
“I don’t understand how to say one thing but you mean another thing but you say it in a way that everyone understands the other thing that you mean,” he tells her early in their relationship. He is literal-minded, and unable to grasp the metaphorical – which is a problem in a film where everything seems abstract and allegorical. “There’s like this other person growing inside of me, and he’s trying to get out”, he says, in an attempt to describe his struggle to express his new feelings to her. It is as though, like so many lovers before him, he is becoming a poet and attempting to reinvent the language of love, even as he gets caught in his own metaphor and cannot understand it. Indeed, “I don’t understand” becomes this couple’s mutual mantra, as they hesitantly try on the gestures of attachment.
“Everything’s fine,” she insists repeatedly, as the city visibly burns behind them. This instantiates the “this is fine” meme, when clearly everything is not. After all, even as she keeps trying to shut down his explorations of his feelings (“it’s not complicated”) and is unable to respond in kind, she also notices that her cyst has transformed into a little wooden door, with someone or something occasionally knocking from inside, wanting to get out – and even though this seems an obvious metaphor for her own pent-up feelings, no one is able to see it in anything but the most literal terms (“it’s a little door on the side of your body”, as more than one character, including her, observes when asked what it is). When she eventually opens up – which is to say, opens the little door – what he sees in there is not who she is but who he wants her to be (Eleanore Pienta), which is essentially himself. He is, as she had earlier suggested of him, “projecting,” in love less with her than with his own narcissistic idea of her, even as she, though deeply introverted, literally lacks the introspection to be able to look inside of herself and to search her own feelings.
Perhaps we are all projecting. Perhaps there is no little door in her side, no city in flames, no apocalypse – just a damaged, isolated, lost soul conjuring a scenario that enables her to explore herself physiologically and spiritually, to reflect upon her shut-in emotions, and to rediscover her rhythm. The result is a dry, droll, deadpan affair, intimate yet surreal, where feelings, precisely for their constrained, constipated expression, ring true, even as the film’s fictive end times are constructed against the backdrop of real derelict locations in Baltimore. Little Doors may seem a fanciful whimsy, entirely free of gravity, but despite its comic quaintness, it is also affecting and sad. For in his oblique, mannered way, Oberbeck reminds us what it is to be both human and a self, locked in or locked out but forever striving to break through and dance freely to one’s own tune – even if not with others.
strap: In Anthony Oberbeck’s deadpan directorial debut, lost, literal-minded souls explore romance in an apocalyptic world of metaphor and allegory
© Anton Bitel
