There is a post on tumblr that makes the rounds now and that that states something along the lines of ‘loving horror means watching a lot of not very good movies.’ The prophets of old are correct. And this, despite being labeled a thriller and not horror, has enough genre crossover that I can safely say it is one of those not very good movies.
We have had a good run of good, or, if not good, admirably made movies here on my dumb little blog. This, unfortunately, was neither. The mood of the night was something my ex and I had coined ‘rabbit hole’, which can loosely define as ‘someone becomes obsessed by uncovering some kind of Hidden Secret that ultimately unravels and/or destroys their life.’ Investigative horror but not Just that. Some noir, but not all. You know it when you see it. I tell you this because I desperately need the concept to catch on so I can find these easier.
Because when you can’t find them easily! You end up watching things like this. The premise has promise. A woman grieving the loss of her child moves into a new, high take, ultra safe apartment building in an attempt to get over her trauma, but becomes rapidly convinced something is Wrong with the technology in the building. From that description it sounds like a tight little thriller about the trade offs we make when we sacrifice privacy for safety.
It’s not. And a lot of the reasons its not revolves around the choices made with the protagonist, Lauren’s, mental illness. This movie does not know the difference between bipolar, traumatic brain injury, ptsd, psychosis, and schizophrenia. They say Lauren is ‘bipolar’ and ‘manic depressive.’ But! She got this from a head injury. But! She sustained this head injury in the home invasion that killed her child. But! She is shown actively hallucinating. But! She has obvious ptsd flashbacks. But! She has been hospitalized for a psychotic episode. But! We never see her actually have any bipolar symptoms.
And also bipolar makes you immune to brainwashing. The central conceit of this movie is that the CIA is using this ritzy apartment full of rich people to conduct subliminal messaging brainwashing experiments. That Lauren is immune to because she is bipolar. You almost think they’re gonna side step this because she tells her, shockingly not evil but still a a dick, husband, that she thinks her meds ‘create a buffer’ between the subliminal messages and her.
But nope! Her creepy hacker friend that she makes on a conspiracy theory forum, who’s sections are labeled: General Chat, Big Brother, Radiation, Flash Feed, Vanquish Fear, Radio Waves, Hypnosis, RINT, Frequencies, Revelations, and Meetings, (which, yes I did take a picture of. I had to. It was too funny not to. The hell is rint?) tells her that she is immune to brainwashing because she ‘operates on a different frequency than their tech’ and she has to stop taking her meds because they bring her in line with that frequency. Which is not how, like. Frequencies work.
I was ready to forgive this movie if she and her creepy hacker buddy, a strange, intense man who tells her facts about herself that he learned from her publicly available data, fell in love. They had some stellar romantic tension. But nope. He gets shot in a stairwell and never brought up again!
Which I guess you should expect from a movie with very little understanding of human behavior. In the beginning, we learn that Lauren is out of place because, at a new residents reception, her new in-building bff introduces people by explaining where they work and how much money they make. When she has a ptsd flashback in a swimming pool, making it so she doesn’t help a child who is flailing in the water, everyone acts annoyed at most. And her husband says, at one point: “They almost got to me! But I saw what they did to you! They strapped you to a chair and showed you sounds and images!” Which is in fact indicative of the dialogue in this movie.
They did strap her to a chair though. And it was a pretty innovative strapping someone to a chair scene: they put her in an orthopedic collar, tied her hands down, and tied her to a chair. Which like. Some bad movies have a kink scene worth sitting through the rest of it for. This wasn’t one of them.
The reason they strapped Lauren to a chair was to brainwash her into killing a child. Which I guess was supposed to prove their tech worked? There is an obvious fake out where she kidnaps the child, then shows up with a bloody duffle bag. The only black guy in the movie, who is revealed to be the evil CIA puppet master, tells her she’s going to get arrested for murder but has helped in the war on terror, and opens the duffel bag only to find a bunch of apples.
The dickhead husband then shoots cia man and we’re propelled to 6 months later where Lauren is pregnant and they’ve bought a house together. Which raises ‘why bring murder charges up at all if we aren’t going to cover how you guys totally just killed a government official in a world where there’s a mind control shadow war going on?’
Anyways. You could’ve made this movie good. Change the experimental mind control apparent building to low income housing that your protag got access to in a housing lottery she entered after becoming homeless due to a relapse in her mental illness. Keep the dead kid too, just don’t connect it to her condition. The complex is high tech and Safe. And then you have the recipe for a high tech paranoia thriller where you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, about abuses of power, safety vs privacy, and the surveillance state. Which this could’ve been! And then. Wasn’t.
I figured you guys were thinking at this point, that I’ll give a positive review for pretty much anything. But no. I just had a lucky streak. Sometimes you watch a not very good movie. But we can learn things from that too. Like: a color faded trauma montage to explain why your protag is mentally ill is kinda dumb! And don’t shoot your husband until he shows you his spy cam footage. And don’t move into a fancy apartment if it’s run by a guy who’s famous for his advertising psychology research. I leave you with those words of wisdom.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 