Citadel

With the Leeds Film Festival taking place I couldn't resist to go and see as many films as possible, but unfortunately, because of work and other reasons the amount of screenings that I could actually manage to see was extremely limited.
Despite that, Citadel was a film that a friend was really excited to see, and being on of the highlights of a 12-hour marathon of horror films I grew a lot of interest on it.
Before the screening, there was a brief introduction where a man explain a bit of the directors reasoning of making this film and how it was inspired by being victim of a vandalic act when he was young causing in him a severe case of agoraphobia.
The man also mention that among the several horror films he has seen before this was probably one of the best ones; now talking about growing expectation? Well he did a good job on that.

Directed by Ciarán Foy, the film started with the right foot: Tommy and his pregnant wife are about to move out from an undesirable building to move to a new council house but on the process she gets brutally attack by a gang right in front of him. The baby is born, but a few months pass and his wife still in a coma in a hospital. At this point his is suffering from a terrible agoraphobia that follows him in a tormenting way. When his daughter gets taken away from him, he has to face a big task to try to get her back.

Up until this point I found really impressive how they manage to transform and transmit the anxiety and sense of fear that agoraphobia was tormenting the character and not to mention that the actor was doing a fantastic work. I also like the fact that they didn't go for fancy shots or lenses for many of the inner scenes, instead they keep a realistic and simple screen play.
Roughly around half of the film is when all the suspense and horror vanished on me as the the agoraphobic fear represented with this gang suddenly seems transformed into a zombie film.
Weird whining sounds, twitching slow moves and poor makeup really put me down to what could have been a good psychological thriller.
From my point of view, the film went too far and too solid on the representation of this phobia which is a shame for such a good start and performance. I keep blaming the guy who builded up my expectations of the film from the beginning but still Neither me or my friend thought was worth to recommend.

http://www.leedsfilm.com/films/citadel/