Right at Your Door (2006)

This movie is a no-budget thriller that takes place in just one location (mostly) and with just a handful of characters. It's bleak, intense and exciting, and well worth a watch, but probably not a second viewing. Mary McCormack and Rory Cochrane play Lexi and Brad, a couple who get caught up in events when a series of dirty bombs go off in downtown Los Angeles. Brad barricades himself in the house with next door's yard man, while Lexi, contaminated by the blast, struggles outside their home. And that's it for plot really. Since there's clearly little budget here, the filmmakers use this to their advantage - the dirty bombs and the aftermath is relayed through radio reports and the briefest of glimpses onscreen (Lexi and Brad have just moved to this house, so their TV's not set up, handily), and through the sheer terror that McCormack channels as Lexi is forced to exist with Brad, but apart from him, through plastic sheeting in his sealed off house. Hints of their life before the catastrophy show a very real couple struggling to survive and keep up their spirits while the world around them seems to crumble. 

The beauty and the terror behind Right at Your Door is that these people aren't Tom Cruise super-men always just avoiding danger, escaping death and miraculously finding cures, they're average Joes trying to work out whether what the radio says is really the best way to stay alive, or whether it's all just propaganda - the shocker being that the authorities don't seem to have any answers, just platitudes. The overall effect of the movie is terrifying and it opens a lot of questions.