Storage: The Movie

The gory Australian crime thriller “Storage” (2009, directed by Michael Craft) is now out on DVD. All imaginable horrors unfurl in the shadowy setting of a grimy self storage facility. Is it a film that sensitive self storage customers should avoid at all costs? Is it fair to the self storage industry? Is it any good?

“You get some pretty strange types coming in,” says Leonard, the breezy, self-confident manager of “City Storage” somewhere in Australia. “As a rule, we just let them do what they want.” They sure do.

Murder and mayhem in self storage

Jimmy is a seventeen-year-old who has just witnessed the murder of his dad, stabbed to death by a mugger in a pedestrian underpass. Uncle Leonard takes Jimmy under his wing, and gives him a job in “City Storage”.

The setting is familiar: long corridors of units lit only by artificial lighting, a small office linked to security cameras, minimal staff. Working alongside them is the comely and youthful Zia. Her involvement means this action film has a certificate 18 for more than just the gore (but ‒ steady on ‒ not a lot more).

Anyhow, Jimmy is burning with a sense of injustice and the need to avenge his father’s killer. There are a few dodgy clients in this self storage facility. Well, to be frank, there aren’t many clients, and every one of them seems to be decidedly dodgy, deranged or criminal.

Self storage’s Industry standards

Despite Uncle Leonard’s disciplinarian approach, and his military background (actually, because of it, we discover), this storage facility is not exactly a model of the industry. There are rats all over the place ‒ bad enough in itself, but this is used as an alibi to break into the private units using bolt-cutters, ostensibly to keep down the vermin. Leonard does not, as a matter of policy, refer any suspicious behaviour to the police because, he claims, experience has shown him that the police habitually fail to take any action. Leonard, ex-SAS man, prefers to sort things out for himself.

Somewhat eccentrically, customers use large metal barrels to store their treasures in. Maybe that’s an Australian storage habit. Certainly provides protection from the rats.

And they don’t seem to have any trolleys in this facility. A small point perhaps, but it would certainly make it easier to shift the corpses about.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We don’t want to spoil the fun by giving away the story: suffice it to say that Jimmy works up a froth of suspicion about a weird customer, Francis Piesecki, who seems to be hiding a gun in his barrel, and whom he suspects of murder.  Jimmy’s efforts to unravel Piesecki’s secret, with the reluctant aid of his new lover Zia (yes, you guessed it), spirals into a tornado of violence, some of it quite stomach-churningly graphic.

Five stars out of ten

Sounds awful? Well, this is actually quite a well-made film. It’s got a consistent “noir” texture, underpinned by a moody sound-track, with endless half-lit interiors, the grime, the rats, the criminality, the femme-fatale, and the modern equivalent of slatted blinds: the striped black-and-white images of surveillance cameras.

The performances are admirable: Damien Garvey, as Uncle Leonard, finds a delicate balance between a reassuring presence and menace. Matthew Scully, as the seventeen-year-old Jimmy, gives a convincing portrait of the jejune youth on the brink of adulthood. Saskia Burmeister, as Zia, has the necessary flaky mystery of a young femme fatale. And Robert Mammone, as Francis Piesecki, looks a suitably disturbed when he needs to be, which is most of the time. Most of the cast have honed their skills and their assured screen presence in Australian TV series, such as “Neighbours” and “Home and Away”.

LoveFilm gives “Storage” two-and-a-half stars out of five; IMDb (the Internet Movie Database) a similar vote of 5.2 stars out of 10.

But you’ve got to like this kind of movie. Which is to say, you’ve got to like what’s going to happen with there’s a man tied up in a bath with a plastic bag over his head, and the maniac who put him there gets out the hammer.

A fair portrayal of the self storage industry?

Hoping that a Certificate 18 crime-thriller called “Storage” is going to good for the self storage industry is a bit like using excerpts from “Psycho” to promote holidays in country hotels, or shower fittings. It ain’t going to happen.

“Storage” the movie exploits (a) the popular prejudice that self storage facilities are the setting for weird people to do peculiar and secretive things; and (b) the kind of lonely corridors and spaces that may be unnerving to some people. What use is it to tell the world that self storage facilities are essentially clean (not to mention rodent free), well-run and deeply mundane places where nothing at all interesting ever happens. Can’t really make a movie about that!

Anyhow, you can judge for yourself if this is the kind of movie for you by taking a peek (between your fingers) at the trailer: