At the gates

At the gates
Original title:At the gates
Director:Augustus Meleo Bernstein
Release:Vod
Running time:97 minutes
Release date:Not communicated
Rating:
Ana, a Salvadoran housekeeper, enlists the help of her teenage son Nico to clean the home of the Barris, an influential Los Angeles family. When someone rings the front doorbell, their employers, Marianne and Peter, inform them that immigration agents are looking for them. The couple suggests that Ana and Nico hide in the basement of their house and hand over their cell phones as a precaution. As the days go by, each family becomes more and more suspicious and questions each other's true intentions.

Mulder's Review

It is always interesting to discover a first film of a young director as it is an important indicator on his career birth and on the themes that will characterize his filmography. Certainly Augustus Meleo Bernstein has a gift to know how to stage a story and to play constantly with the nerves of the spectators and their first impressions in front of the drama that is played out before their eyes. 

As At the Gates shows so well, a successful and gripping thriller does not require outrageous twists and turns or spectacular scenes, but rather the ability to create an unsettling atmosphere, to have sufficiently defined characters and, above all, to capture the audience's attention from beginning to end. When discovering At the Gates, we have the impression of discovering the film of an assiduous student of Alfred Hitchcock so much his film transforms the spectators into true witnesses of what unfolds before their eyes. 

Ana (Vanessa Benavente) is a cleaning lady from El Salvador. One day she decides to bring her teenage son Nico (Ezekiel Pacheco) with her to help clean the house of a wealthy family in Los Angeles. But that very day, her employers Marianne (Miranda Otto) and Peter Barris (Noah Wyle) inform them that immigration agents are looking for them. Ana accepts the invitation to take shelter in their home with her son until the police are no longer watching the property where she works. As the days go by and a tense atmosphere emerges in this beautiful property, Ana comes to doubt the validity of the owners who are sheltering him and his mother. This is a compelling drama that takes a hard look at illegal immigration in the United States.

The writer and director Augustus Meleo Bernstein offers us a perfectly mastered first film that will let us immerse ourselves in a tense atmosphere whose action takes place essentially in a large house. It comes out of it a persistent feeling of claustrophy which will make us spend a good moment in front of a film with simple appearances but whose perfectly calibrated mechanics certainly makes Augustus Meleo Bernstein a director to follow.

At the Gates
Written and directed by Augustus Meleo Bernstein
Produced by Jhanvi Motla, Paulo Torres & Augustus Meleo Bernstein 
Starring Vanessa Benavente, Ezekiel Pacheco, Miranda Otto, Noah Wyle, Sadie Stanley
Music by Julia Newman
Cinematography : Alan Torres
Edited by Jacob Ehrlich 
Production companies : Picturehouse
Running time : 97 minutes

Seen on September 6, 2022 at the Deauville International Center

Mulder's Mark: