Session 9

Saw Session 9, a horror film. It opens with a foreman being given a tour through a colossal, abandoned mental asylum (~woo~oo!) His crew is supposed to gut the asbestos insulation of the building so it can be refurbished. His overly intense assistant is introduced along with his crew. The film uses smeary digital cameras and no post-processing, looking like a cheaply-produced film. One of the crew-members is a stupid but pretty dude, there's also the smart one, the asshole, and of course the foreman and sidekick. It looks a lot like it's shaping up to be a throwback 80s slasher. The tour-guide even informs them that mental patients sometimes come back, setting up the killer.

However, this film sticks close to Shining-esque mind-games and vague hints at a haunting/possession. Each of the men is personally effected by some strange aspect of the building. The stupid one reveals he is afraid of the dark, but of course must spend a lot of time in unlit crawlspaces. The sidekick is weirdly militaristic about the job, describing people as 'obstacles' and 'liabilities.' The asshole finds an incinerator where holocaust-evoking gold teeth and glasses have piled up. He schemes endlessly about how he can keep this hoard to himself. The smart one obsessively sneaks off to listen to taped interviews with one of the patients, a woman with split personality. And the foreman is clearly falling apart under some huge home-life problem.

Gloriously, the film is quite scary but completely jump-free. Thank heaven! It often does that thing where the soundtrack gets all quiet and the camera slowly zooms in, but nothing jumps. Instead, the built-up tension curdles into worry and, yes, fear. The film is not terrifically subtle, but it is atmospheric and moody. The dilapidated asylum evokes the hell-sequences in Silent Hill. The plot is strongly reminiscent of The Shining. The visual aesthetic is cheap and I think, alas, that this is due to actual budgetary constraints. The filmmakers embrace the limitation, but it does hinder the film a bit, I think.

The film is a nice little horror. It never cheaps out with jumps and so I was able to handle it pretty well. Take this statement for what it is, friends. I am a total wimp about jumps, so you'll find none of that here, but I am pretty tough when it comes to tension and grotesquerie, and there's a bit of that here. Not a bad film. It's not one of my favorites, but not bad.