An asbestos cleaning team enters an abandoned mental asylum to do some cleaning to prepare the building for something more commercial. Turns out the asylum may not be so abandoned after all...
Review:
For a movie that I constantly avoided for the worry that it was simply a SciFi-esque cheap thriller with a somewhat decent cast, I was more than pleasantly surprised with Session 9. As I sat down to screen this film for my Art of Cinema class (after my class denied watching Evil Dead 2 over this...ugh....), I was ready to cast the film off as yet another people-enter-bad-place-and-make-dumb-decisions film, but there was, get ready for this, a plot!
While it may be being facetious to add the bold italics to that statement, I find that simply having a decent and original plot in a horror/thriller film instantly gives it merit. If you want mindless B-movie exploitation horror, there is plenty of that in the 80's and spamming Netflix weekly. Session 9 dug under my skin with it's close knit group of characters and their ever-growing tension throughout the film, to the point where I felt their struggle physically and mentally. For someone looking for a great psychological film with a couple brain exercises and hard-hitting, yet sparse, gore, I implore you to look no further.
For our asbestos team of 5, including cast members such as David Caruso and Josh Lucas, we quickly become the 6th worker as we are given a decent exploitation into the personal lives of our workers and why they have stuck with this unsafe and poor-paid job for so long. I think the screenwriter/director Brad Anderson did extremely well with giving our characters a story, since a horror film is not exactly where we find these sort of things. After we are introduced to our setting, which becomes a character of the film itself, and given a dose of back story, the mind-games begin.
The film is one of the better looking horror films I've seen, especially considering how low the budget was one the film (only $379,000!!!). Certain scenes of the asylum, especially the sinister ward A where our lead man Gordon, played by Peter Mullan, has some sort of connection with the halls and passages, are standouts in my memory, and the clear vastness of the building as not many scenes are repetitive. Also, it should be duly noted that the director had only had experience directing two rom-coms prior to this film. It's a no-brainer as to why his next film was the incredibly darker and depressing The Machinist, with this being the foreplay.
At the end of the day, I would still label this film as a horror film, but I wouldn't follow that statement without my reasoning as to why it's most certainly a standout in the genre. It has smarts, it has a decent cast and setting, and it's not what you'd expect from the setup of its story. I will admit that if you aren't paying close attention to the film, there will be some things that may not be completely clear to you, but hey, if you aren't paying attention to it, why are you watching it? Don't choose this as a midnight movie to just have a couple drinks and talk during it, but rather, give it your full undivided attention, and you'll be rewarded with a smart, engaging horror movie that threatens the question; are we aware of the notion of insanity when we ourselves may be?
Sidenote: Sorry for the late review(s), this past week was my 21st birthday, so it's safe to assume movie reviewing was the last thing I was focused on! I'll be back on track from here on out!
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