I enjoyed finally getting to see Rio Chavarro (a former associate of mine) in a movie. In The Gate, he plays a young lawyer who seems very confused. He’s sitting in an airport terminal when a girl (Andrea Ocampo) strikes up a conversation with him. She’s obviously very troubled. Various drug addictions killed her acting career, and there are ominous scars on her wrists. The lawyer is barely able to lend a sympathetic ear. This is one of those movies that isn’t about what’s being said. It’s about the inner turmoil the characters are going through while they say it.

The music is way overdone in the opening scene. It communicates S-A-D-N-E-S-S and L-O-S-S – just like that, in capital letters. The shots aren’t perfect, either. When we see the girl in close-up, she’s positioned about a quarter of the way down the screen from where she should be. The movie was obviously a logistical challenge to make – the filmmakers shot in the Fort Lauderdale Airport, which looks all but deserted. It’s disappointing that they didn’t follow through with their camerawork after securing such a great location.

The performances and high-concept premise make it all worthwhile. The girl’s transition from Good Samaritan to helpless victim is utterly heartbreaking, and Ocampo deserves credit for that. Chavarro makes the lawyer’s confusion seem genuine, and he’s even more effective in the flashback scenes that explain how the lawyer came to be sitting in an airport terminal – even though I think these scenes are misconceived. Without giving too much away, the story would have had more dramatic weight if the flashbacks had shown the lawyer was a happy man rather than a worrywart.