The Cham­ber

The world is tee­ter­ing on the edge of doom. So says a mon­tage of real-life footage that plays over the open­ing pas­sages of Ben Parker’s The Cham­ber, high­light­ing the fragili­ty of inter­na­tion­al rela­tions. The pre­car­i­ous glob­al sit­u­a­tion even impacts a small sub­ma­rine as it sur­veys the Yel­low Sea on behalf of a pri­vate com­pa­ny look­ing to estab­lish oil rigs in the area.

When the author­i­ty over his ship is giv­en over to a spe­cial ops team, led by Char­lotte Salt’s Edwards, with an undis­closed mis­sion, Mats (Johannes Kuhnke) is not told who these peo­ple are or why they have tak­en com­mand. This debut fea­ture is quick to point out the wider geopo­lit­i­cal forces at play, but like Mats we are left in the dark over who these char­ac­ters real­ly are.

Ear­ly on the cam­era enters the cramped, enclosed space of the sub­mersible, at which point the film becomes cru­cial­ly depen­dent on the strength of the four main actors – as well as Parker’s abil­i­ty to build a com­pelling expe­ri­ence from a min­i­mal­ist set­ting. This envi­ron­ment imme­di­ate­ly lends itself to high ten­sion, as the old ves­sel creaks and groans in tan­dem with body move­ment. Yet despite all the mon­i­tors, gauges and switch­es on show, there’s nev­er a clear sense of the phys­i­cal dimen­sions of the craft. This becomes more of an issue lat­er, as Parker’s over-reliance on rapid cut­ting takes hold.

There’s a lot of tech­ni­cal skill on show here. The light­ing and cin­e­matog­ra­phy make excel­lent use of the water’s visu­al inter­ac­tion with the lumi­nous equip­ment. The use of sound is also effec­tive, with the puls­ing per­cus­sive score – com­posed by Man­ic Street Preach­ers’ front­man James Dean Brad­field – adding ener­gy to scenes that are oth­er­wise lack­ing. The main prob­lem is the script, which throws togeth­er famil­iar arche­types in repet­i­tive cycles of arti­fi­cial con­flict and unearned camaraderie.

The Cham­ber is at its strongest when it focus­es on the hope­less­ness of the premise, espe­cial­ly when it slips deep­er into claus­tro­pho­bic hor­ror ter­rain. There’s lit­tle com­mit­ment to any par­tic­u­lar tone – it nev­er leans too far into idle B‑movie plea­sures, nor is the mate­r­i­al ele­vat­ed with nuanced char­ac­ter work. The con­text and the devi­ous rev­e­la­tions of the crew’s real pur­pose end up amount­ing to lit­tle more than back­ground noise.