A Problem with Fear (2003): Cast & Plot

Laurie Harding Paulo Costanzo is a small shop clerk in the local Calgary mall, living inside a world where everyday scenes of modern life are treated as potential disasters. The film opens with a wry, unsettling tone as a string of deadly incidents appears to orbit around his days—crosswalks, elevators, escalators, and nearly anything tied to consumer culture or technology become objects of fear and dark humor. An elevator suddenly plummets thirty stories, a woman’s scarf becomes tangled in an escalator and ends in tragedy, and a man is struck by a car right before Laurie’s premonition not to cross seems to foreshadow another catastrophe. These sequences are less about shock-value and more about how Laurie processes danger, weaving fear into the fabric of his ordinary routines.