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4:24 p.m. - 2018-05-01 Like Jimmy Stewart in "Rear Window," Marvin is confined to a small space, his bedroom in a low-rent apartment building in a declining neighborhood. Unlike Stewart's character, who was an active photo journalist temporarily laid up by a broken leg, Marvin has spent most of his life as a confined invalid, one of the surviving victims of Strickler's disease: the terrible, usually fatal respiratory affliction introduced in "Mimic." Unable to tolerate cigarette smoke, perfume, and other irritants commonly found in the outside world, Marvin lives in sterile white room, sparsely furnished and cut off from the rest of his mother's apartment by plastic sheets. Claustrophobia, suffocation and isolation are powerful themes that are expressed again and again in this movie, both referencing back to the same two earlier films and expressed in Marvin's life and that of his family and the people in his neighborhood. Other people in the apartment complex, seen through the lens of Marvin's camera, lead separate lives, communicating with their fellow humans only when they occasionally foray into the squalid courtyard and rabbit warren of interconnecting alleyways. Dumpsters, graffiti, garbage, and standing puddles of water make for an unattractive and eerie alternate world , usually viewed from above (Marvin's room) or ground level. In the first half of the movie this grubby and ill-lit setting is the scene of various acts of dark and incompletely viewed violence. Marvin has created names for the people in his neighborhood: Bird Man, Garbage Man, Veiled Lady, and Ma Bell; and is creating a collage of photos of them on his bedroom wall. The limits of his knowledge are made clear when another character explains to him that Ma Bell, whom he thought to be a grandmother constantly on the phone with her family, is in reality a phone sex operator. Marvin's isolated existence is alleviated only by monthly trips to his doctor and by interaction with his sister Rosy, a drug user for whom he feels a helpless responsibility, and his mother (well played by the talented Amanda Plummer), a long-suffering couch potato who constantly suffocates him with her nit-picking concerns (He's fragile, he doesn't eat enough) and outright guilt trips ("I don't want to be made to worry about you.") Isolated physically from most of humankind and emotionally from his own family, Marvin has a vague desire to be on his own, though how he would be able to achieve that goal is not clear.
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