10-33
2021 · 10m · Canada
Directed by Alexander Maxim Seltzer
Ava's quiet date night at the cinema turns into a nightmare when she is trapped in a toilet stall during an active shooting, with only a thin door separating her from the gunman.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A bathroom stall as bunker during an active shooter—yeah, the premise is inherently sick, but Seltzer plays it almost *too* straight, mining tension from spatial claustrophobia rather than subverting the genre formula itself. The real transgression would've been what he *didn't* show us.
Formally disciplined in its staging and editing—the constraint of a single location recalls siege cinema traditions from Hitchcock onward—but the execution feels more functional than interrogative, a thriller that knows its craft without questioning what that craft is really doing.
The film's entire architecture hangs on the decision to keep us locked in Ava's POV from inside that stall: every sound becomes weaponized, every shadow on the door a potential threat, and that commitment to perceptual restriction turns a high-concept premise into something claustrophobic and genuinely disorienting with minimal resources.