The Portable Door review
There’s something sinister going on behind closed doors at mysterious London firm JW Wells & Co in Sky Cinema’s The Portable Door, a fantasy adventure set in an office that’s somewhere between Harry Potter’s Ministry of Magic and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Co-produced by The Jim Henson Company and based on the first novel of Tom Holt’s JW Wells & Co young adult series (so there’s potential for numerous sequels), the movie introduces us to ordinary bloke Paul (Shadow & Bone’s Patrick Gibson) who gets a job as an intern at the company despite having no idea what they actually do there.
He’s paired up with another intern, Sophie (Sophie Wilde), and they are both placed under the tutelage of grumpy manager Mr Tanner (Sam Neill), who gives them a list of rules – the most important being they must not stay in the office building after the end of the working day.
Ignoring some of the possibly-mystical oddities around the building – machines that spout unintelligible data, Tanner’s odd response to a stray office stapler left on the floor, something suspicious scuttling into a dark corner – Paul finally realises all may not be what it seems when the quixotic CEO of the company, Humphrey Wells (Christoph Waltz), sets him a special task.
He wants Paul to locate a missing magical door that can transport you to wherever you want to be.
It turns out – after a rather plodding (and doorless) beginning – that JW Wells & Co does have some fascinating secrets to be uncovered. Of course, once they find it, Sophie and Paul have to try out the portable door a few times and use it to explore the world (which gets a bit tedious), but once we’re back in the spooky London office things get far more interesting and the Henson Company effects, along with Waltz and Neill, take centre stage.
There are some great ideas here – the form the door is transported in, and where the instructions are written is really clever and not to be spoiled – and when the movie goes full-tilt into bonkers territory towards the end it almost makes up for the slow start.
Waltz is suitably devious as the secretive CEO with grand plans to modernise the business, and Wilde and Gibson are perfectly likeable as the pair with no idea what is really going on.
But it is Sam Neill – gruffly thundering along office corridors, magnificently growling all his lines – who makes this fantasy worth a watch, and even worthy of a sequel visit to the wizardly JW Wells & Co.
The Portable Door is on Sky Cinema in the UK and MGM+ in the US from April 7.
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