Alone in Four Walls (2008)
Director: Alexandra Westmeier
Writer: Alexandra Westmeier
Starring: Thomas Grant, Aaron Johnson, Emma Catherwood, Therese Bradley, Moira Brooker
Language: German
Runtime: 85 Minutes approx.
Age Rating: 15
Genre: Documentary
Reviewed by Ross Miller
Alone in Four Walls is possibly one of the most boring cinematic experiences I’ve had in a long, long time. Although there are some admirable points it’s trying to get across, it doesn’t succeed very well, leaving a hollow and empty shell of a film.
Alone in Four Walls is a documentary about a young offenders institution — the day to day things they do within it and interviews with them as they tell how they ended up in there and what they aspire to do when they eventually get out.
I have just recently become a fan of the documentary genre. I never used to even look sideways at them but after seeing the films of Michael Moore I have gone on to enjoy many more from the genre since. I am very disappointed to say, as I was really looking forward to it, that Alone in Four Walls is the worst documentary I have seen so far. Now granted I am a newcomer to this type of film, so take what I have said with a grain of salt, but that’s my opinion of it. I really didn’t know a documentary could be this uninteresting.
Usually a documentary will be interesting to me for at least its first half and then most of them lose me. That’s not usually the film’s fault; it’s just there’s only so much that I can usually take of being told information about the same thing for very long. Alone in Four Walls lost me within the first five minutes; even though I can understand some of the things they are trying to get across, they just don’t do it in an adequate fashion. The idea that boys as young as eight can be put into a place like this young offenders institution is a disheartening thing on its own but after a few minutes of taking in this idea it becomes very boring. That’s not to say it can’t be appreciated and enjoyed by someone else, but I bordered on hating it.
The film hasn’t got enough in it to sustain anywhere near its 90-plus minute runtime. I felt that it could have been a short documentary (which now seem to pop up at festivals as a sort of experiment in filmmaking) that lasts no more than a half hour. There are a lot of scenes there that definitely should have been taken out in the editing process; for instance, we see the boys make their beds and tidy their rooms about four or five times throughout the movie, with no reason for the inane repetition.
All throughout it just seemed like it meandered its way along with little worthwhile scenes/moments and by the end it all seemed like it lacked a substantial point. It does say at one point that over ninety percent of these boys will end up in a real, adult prison when they are older and I guess you could see that’s an important point but by the time we get to that I pretty much had already realized that’s what they were ultimately going to say. So when it finally does tell us that I just thought, “And?”
The film was noticeably underwhelming. It had the potential for some very powerful filmmaking, and in all honesty I think this would have been much better as a fictional/dramatised film, but instead it tends to play things very low-key for some reason. The end sequence feels like it wants you to have some sort of emotional revelation that is supposed to hit you hard and leave you thinking about it after it’s over. But again, it just didn’t have the desired affect.
I think this is the first documentary that I have not liked. Alone in Four Walls was a big disappointment for me; it plainly just bored the hell out of me. I can’t remember the last time I looked at my watch as much in a cinema — and that is never a good sign.
