Synopsis:
A serial killer, with a religious secret, captures four victims and plays a deadly game of Q & A. The winner is promised to come out alive from this "wreck" room where truth, sin and religious faith are the game of choice.

The plot is comparable to Sartre’s masterwork, “No Exit”, with aspects of the original “Night of the Living Dead”. “No Exit” featured three very different personalities who come to loathe each other while confined to a single room, which turned out to be, literally, Hell. Den explores this concept as well as Romero’s underlying theme from NOTLD - personal differences that obstruct the group’s ability to come together for the sake of the greater good.

Our protagonist, Den, drugs & kidnaps four people, three women & a man who’s married to one of them. They awaken to find themselves imprisoned in a large room, wearing hospital gowns & shackles. As they try to grasp the reality of their situation, Den enters the room and begins to conduct the first round of what is to become a series of increasingly more sadistic debates, as well as revealing some vague insight to his motives. He encourages the group to engage him in conversation, suggesting that the better their conversational skills, the better their chances of survival will be. He says he wants to get to know them, to see what makes them tick, & for them to get to know each other, or more accurately, for them to get to know certain things about each other. It seems our group of strangers have some skeletons stashed away in mutual closets & Den delights in using that to provoke paranoia, distrust & animosity among them. He lays responsibility for certain events on the characters to not only further their distress, but to absolve himself of any guilt in his own mind. By injecting certain topics and suggestions, Den keeps his prisoners at each other’s throats in order to try & quash any desires to unify for the greater good. Days pass & the predicament continuously spirals downward as the prisoners are starved, humiliated, taunted & physically tormented.

(NOTE: The plot to Den may sound extremely close to the plot of “SAW”. DEN was completed in 2001 and screened at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in Australia in July of 2002 – where Dana Ryan won for Best Actress. The filmmakers of SAW are from Melbourne. Currently, we have a lawyer looking at the similarities between DEN & SAW.)

Cast:
Greg Arce, Stephanie Rettig, Lee Schall, Sabrina O’Neill, Dana J. Ryan

Crew:
Writer/Producer/Director: Greg Arce
Director of Photography: Jacky Hay
Editors: Tomer Almagor & Rom Lipschitz

120 minutes, 2001