No matter where Natalie (Alicia Sanz) goes in “Push,” she’s confronted with an empty house, suddenly widowed after a devastating car accident has taken the life of her husband and thrust back into work without any time to grieve, giving tours of high-end real estate as a realtor. It’s a particularly lonely job when there are few that could afford the cavernous mansion that serves as her latest assignment and the setting for David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s taut thriller, but she has some company when she’s eight months pregnant and at least one or two prospective buyers for the 14,000-square foot abode, registered with the local historic preservation society when its features from the late 19th century such as an antique elevator remain intact.
When the sign out front welcoming guests to the open house notes the hosts are “Hitch and Wan Real Estate,” genre fans will know that it’s not going to be an easy day at the office for Natalie, who surely makes a mistake in staying a little longer than expected to greet one last visitor (Raul Castillo), but she’s doing it for her unborn child. The impending arrival of the baby makes for an unconventional heroine in Charbonier and Powell’s third feature, which like their previous films “The Boy Behind the Door” and “The Djinn” finds someone desperate to make an escape from dangerous surroundings, but rather than being hampered by the fact that she’s about to deliver as she’s terrorized by the last-minute houseguest with an axe to grind for some unknown reason, Natalie is emboldened by it, having something to live for after it feels as if everything else has been cruelly taken away and making the stranger’s terrorism seem benign by comparison to all the grief she’s already faced.
That isn’t to suggest it’s easy for Natalie to escape the house, which perched at a remove from the city leaves little outside help to be had and filled with long corridors that give equal opportunity to be ambushed as to hide, and Charbonier and Powell show their increasing formal mastery by rarely getting in the way of the inherent tension, letting the action unfold in long, suspenseful tracking shots free of much dialogue, but allowing the shadows and the silence speak volumes. After premiering last fall at the genre mecca of the Sitges Film Festival in Spain last fall, “Push” is now induces chills in homes everywhere as it premieres on Shudder and recently Charbonier and Powell spoke about making the most out of a limited number of elements, how a side job taking pictures of homes led to the film’s frightening premise and finally getting out to see the premiere of one of their own films as their rise to the highest ranks of horror filmmaking coincided with the pandemic.
Justin Powell: It was, which is crazy. We wrote the original draft back in 2015, and the original draft of “Boy” was 2016, so it has it beat by a year. It’s something that we’ve been trying to make since we wrote that original draft, and it’s just really hard as an indie filmmaker – or any filmmaker – to get any movie off the ground. -Especially an indie filmmaker though.
David Charbonier: Especially an indie filmmaker. [laughs] And it was just about finding the right partners, financing and resources. We’ve had to be really resourceful for all of our movies so far, and fortunately, one of the producers from our previous film really enjoyed collaborating with us and gracious enough to sign on for this one.
This seems to hearken back to the DaVinci quote, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It’s so engaging with such a limited amount of dialogue and characters and while you make it look effortless, does that take the experience of other films to know what to pare away?
David Charbonier: I’m glad that it looked effortless. It was definitely a challenging shoot. Like so many indie productions are. It was really helpful to have made “The Djinn” and “Boy Behind the Door.” Every production you do, you really learn so many lessons and you are able to hone in better on your craft and style, so we were able to bring those to this and really focus on just trying to push ourselves with how we build suspense, how we show character and we’re really proud of it. I don’t think it would have turned out as great if we did it before “The Djinn.”
David, is it true that you were actually a real estate photographer for a side hustle? I understand that’s what inspired this and to go by your films in general, it seems like it might’ve been an inherently terrifying job.
David Charbonier: It wasn’t inherently terrifying, but it was inherently stressful. Real estate agents and homeowners can be pretty tough, so you’re navigating that, but definitely with this project, I remember I was shooting this very big house in the hills and the signal up there is always really bad. I just felt very alone and a bit unsafe and I remember talking to Justin later [saying], “This would be a really great scenario for a story if we can like come up with something.” We do love movies that feel like they could happen to anyone, anywhere, like an any day scenario that just might be overlooked, and obviously we changed the main character to not be me.
Alicia Sanz does seem to look a little different. How did she come onboard to play the lead?
Justin Powell: We have to give our credit to our casting director Amy Lippins. She’s been with us for all of our films so far and she found Alicia. We weren’t familiar with her before this film, but Amy brought her to us and we just like immediately knew, “Oh, she’s Natalie.” She was so prepared and what she likes to do to prepare for a role, everything was in alignment with what we were hoping for.
David Charbonier: We worked with her a lot on the character and explaining what we envisioned the character to be, but then she also had her own interpretation and we worked together on shaping that. We like doing that with our actors on our previous movies. It really is more of a collaboration [and we figure out the relationship between] the camera and them and the space and building the tension out of that because we like to lean away from heavy exposition or dialogue. We really like these scenarios to feel real and natural and when you are put in a situation like this, you really wouldn’t be talking a lot. You would really be physical about how you’re going to escape or survive.
Justin Powell: And then Raul [Castillo] was someone that we were already familiar with and we actually sent him a letter because we just are such huge admirers. We didn’t think that we were ever going to get him, but he agreed to sign on, and we just got super lucky with the casting on this. It was a difficult shoot, but the one thing that was not difficult was casting.
What was it figuring out the character of the house? There’s a lot of details – like an elevator – that seem like opportunities born from a house of a certain era.
Justin Powell: For the house, at least when we wrote it, it was a little more open-ended. We had an idea of what it was supposed to be, but the elevator was not something that was originally in the script. Once we got the location and scouted it, we [realized] it has this amazing elevator and [we thought] “This is definitely getting written in.” We had this whole sequence that was in an attic and her climbing out onto the roof and we swapped that out for what is now the current elevator sequence in the movie. We do that a lot with our stories where we have a loose idea of how the story is going to play out and then once we actually get to the location that we’re going to shoot in, we tailor it more to that. The only one that we haven’t done that with so far is “The Djinn,” because we had to do everything backwards with that one.
David Charbonier: That might have come out a little bit of our love with classic movies, like Hitchcock, most obviously. A lot of his movies were black-and-white, so it was a lot about shadows and silhouettes. We were also really inspired by ‘80s and ’90s horror and thrillers, which are really underrated with how they’re shot and executed. “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” for instance, looks so beautiful and we really wanted to hearken back to that and it did come through with the colors. They were a lot more muted. We definitely pulled that back. We tried to play with more grain and texture and interestingly enough, even though there were a lot of shadows, we did a lot of work in lower end contrast, which soften the blacks. We were really trying to push ourselves to emulate that period because we just have such a love for that ‘90s type of horror.
The influences seem to be summed up well by the “Hitch and Wan Real Estate” sign in the front lawn.
Justin Powell: Those are both major inspirations, so we hope that that comes through and we’re really glad that you clocked that because like David said. They really are the two most undeniable voices in horror — obviously Hitchcock, but everything James Wan has done, he’s reinvented horror into something that’s way more sophisticated and mainstream, so they’re both so inspirational as like indie filmmakers. We definitely look up to them.
With the long takes, everything is likely meticulously planned out, but did anything happen that you might not have expected but made it into the film and you really like about it?
David Charbonier: That actually is a really hard one, but this shoot was pretty logistically difficult and I don’t know that it necessarily inspired new things. It was more troubleshooting and figuring out how to make things work. There were some things that we had to cut out and tailor the story to make sure that it still worked.
Justin Powell: Yeah, I feel like that’s actually something that’s maybe a little different from our previous two films, because we did have instances of that where there was a weird [obstacle]. On “Boy Behind the Door,” we couldn’t shoot at the end of the driveway, so we had to like create the sequence where Bobby jumps out of the car. That didn’t really happen in this. It was more like, “Oh, there’s a problem,” but we were really happy that we were able to make it work.
What was it like taking the film to Sitges?
David Charbonier: That was probably one of our best life experiences ever. It was the first festival we’ve ever attended in person because our first two movies came out during the pandemic, so there were a lot of restrictions with that. But being in Spain — and I had never actually been out of the country personally — it was just so incredible. It definitely gives us motivation to like try to make another movie that could maybe end up in a festival in Spain.
Justin Powell: Yeah, it was truly an incredible experience. I had I had been out of the country a few times, but that trip in particular was sublime and now having it come out is surreal, just knowing that it’s going to be exposed to the world. It’s something that we’ve lived with for such a long time, so it just feels it doesn’t really feel like it’s actually happening and it’ll feel more real on Friday, but it also feels good. We need it to come out, we need it to be born, so we don’t have to think about it for a while.
“Push” starts streaming on Shudder on July 11th.