The young owner of a 24-hour self-storage business must survive a tense night trapped inside her own facility when confronted by violent thugs in Unit 234 (onscreen title: Unit 234: The Lock Up), now available on VOD. It’s a little too easy to guess the direction the screenplay by Derek Steiner goes in, but slick direction from Andy Tennant (Fool’s Gold, The Bounty Hunter) and an especially engaging lead performance by Isabelle Fuhrman make this a nifty little thriller that never wears out its welcome.
Fuhrman stars as Laurie Saltair, who took over ownership of a Jacksonville self-storage lot after the death of her parents in a tragic car accident. Boyfriend Jordan (Anirudh Pisharody) pushes her to come out to Nashville to celebrate her 25th birthday, but when her lone nighttime employee cancels on her at the last minute, she’s forced to look over the facility herself.
That would usually make for a lonely night at a facility where customers can generally take care of their own needs, and Laurie finds herself channel surfing, briefly turning on director Tennant’s Hitch. Her uneventful evening is stirred by a mystery man (played by Don Johnson) attempting to get into his unit, but the name he gives doesn’t match the picture on his profile, and he gets a little too aggressive before sulking away when Laurie threatens to call the cops.
Unfortunately, his goons (including characters played by Christopher James Baker and James DuMont) stick around—and cut the power. And when Laurie checks out that unit that Johnson’s character was trying to get into—the titular Unit 234—she finds another mystery man: Clayton (Jack Huston), who is handcuffed to a gurney and just might be missing a kidney.
Who are these people, and exactly what is going on? The way in which Unit 234 withholds information from us feels a little too artificial, and makes it easy to guess that there are some twists and turns coming around the corner. The exact nature of those twists and turns are still a surprise, but require some funky character motivation, and feel as if things should have been resolved a lot sooner had these characters just talked it out.
But we don’t have a lot of time to consider the plot mechanics as Laurie goes John McClane within the self-storage lot, crawling through units and backrooms to evade her potential captors; having an additional character she feels obligated to protect also adds to the tension. Director Tennant keeps Unit 234 moving at a fast enough pace to keep us engaged through an expedient runtime.
But the real star of the show here is Fuhrman, who makes for an especially empathetic protagonist who we’re rooting for throughout. Best known for her roles as the antagonist in the Orphan films, Fuhrman is effortlessly compelling as a relatable and resourceful heroine that the movie never attempts to turn into an action hero. Johnson and Huston are both solid in support, though the script asks a little more from their characters than its single-minded lead.
Unit 234 doesn’t detour much from its plot-driven narrative, but the film has a lot of fun with self-storage tropes given the primary location. Cluttered units full of boxes of junk are used as hiding places, and characters dig around in search of anything they can use. Bolt cutters are utilized as one of the story’s most useful tools, and figure in a satisfying finale.
Unit 234 makes for a nice comparison to Tin Soldier, also released this weekend on Prime Video. Both films are expedient genre efforts that clock in at running times of under 80 minutes, but where Tin Soldier was haphazardly thrown together from whatever extraneous material that the filmmakers had to pad out the running time, Unit 234 has been trimmed and whittled down into a tight little thriller that never turns dull.
The result may not be award-winning cinema, but Unit 234 delivers exactly what it promises: a lean, tense thriller built on a high-concept concept and anchored by Fuhrman’s standout performance. For fans of single-setting, self-contained thrillers with a few twists and turns, it’s well worth taking out of storage.
