A Problem with Fear 2003

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.

Michelle Camille Sullivan Harding, Laurie’s sister, is not merely a bystander in his anxieties. She runs product development at Global Safety Inc., a company dedicated to countering the “Fear Storm” that grips the city. The firm promotes technologies like the Early Warning 2 Safe System—a PDA-like device that promises to alert users to danger ahead of time—and the Safe Bracelet that supposedly senses fear and allows people to beep for help. As Laurie’s gift for predicting danger grows stronger, Michelle’s professional ambitions push in a different direction—toward engineering safety into everyday life, even as the world around them grows increasingly unsettled.

Dot Emily Hampshire, Laurie’s girlfriend, becomes a counterpoint to his fear. She conducts a survey on “how the clothes you wear define you,” a project she both loathes and pursues with a curious zeal. Her presence in Laurie’s life grounds the story in a personal relationship while also highlighting the film’s satire of consumer culture: the way people seek meaning, status, and reassurance through brands, gadgets, and appearances, even as the city around them grows emptier and more ridiculous.

The movie is thick with absurd moments that sharpen its satirical edge. A mall announcer keeps requesting a speaker of a foreign language for reasons that never quite land, and the very same mall seems to fade into an almost empty, echoing space as the narrative unfolds. A classroom full of hiccups becomes a comical, surreal vignette that hints at a city out of balance. These episodes are not random glamor shots of chaos; they’re stylized slices that mirror Laurie’s inner life and the larger creep of fear into public spaces.

Throughout it all, the film leans into pop-cultural refrains and commercial jingles as emotional ballast for Laurie. He repeats familiar slogans to steady himself, like Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco treat, a line that punctuates his attempts to anchor himself in familiarity even as the world spirals. Dot’s project and Michelle’s safety tech both illuminate a broader impulse in the story: the uneasy tension between protection and intrusion, between comforting safety and suffocating control.

The core premise follows Laurie’s ongoing effort to conquer his fears—an effort that seems to simultaneously consume him and extend outward to those around him. The more he predicts and experiences danger, the more his worldview hardens, while those closest to him try to mediate or reinterpret what fear means in a world where technology promises to anticipate danger before it happens. The result is a braided narrative about perception, paranoia, and the precarious line between preparation and panic.

As the film progresses, it raises questions about whether fear can truly be vanquished or if it merely mutates into new forms. The events, the devices, and the relationships all converge toward an ending that feels deliberately inconclusive. By the time the final scenes arrive, the audience is left with the sense that Laurie’s fears—though perhaps intensified or redirected—have not been neatly resolved, and that the city outside his apartment window remains a place where danger and comedy coexist in unsettling harmony.

In the end, the story offers a quiet meditation on how humans cope with uncertainty. It presents a world where safety technologies promise certainty, yet human connection—embodied in Michelle’s pragmatic drive, and Dot’s intimate, sometimes contradictory, ache for normalcy—remains the stubborn counterbalance to fear. The result is a thoughtful, offbeat exploration of how fear structures our lives and what it takes, genuinely, to live with it without surrendering to it.