Loading ...In a role almost tailored for actor Tom Cavanagh, George Grieves, unassuming, innocuous, even incredulous to a fault is brought to terms with all his secret fears. Fears whose horror is heightened by going from a circumstance of comfort and loving family setting to one of stark terror, increased and extended by the extent of his own “powers of expectation” unleashed against himself.
Such a setting has been experimented with many times in cinema before, but never comparable to this. Hitchcock was a master in directing psychological horror, yet he never envisioned anything on this scale. Clive Barker, even Stephen King could well treat the demons they inserted into their victim’s head, but again not near as well as progressed here. John Russell, John Collier, H. H. Munro, and the irascible Ambrose Bierce collaborating with Marcel Aymee could not invent a story line like this. It would take a conventionalizing of Franz Kafka (bringing him up to snuff) to make such a leap. Such a near criminal imagination. Shudder, shudder, shudder.
Director Tony Krantz and writer Erik Jendresen have succeeded the former masters in producing horror that sets its own standards. CHILDREN BY NO MEANS SHOULD BE ALLOWED WITHIN A MILE OF ITS SHOWING. Nor the faint of heart. This movie could well serve as shock therapy for the anal retentive. It’s already cured a few petulant little peeves this reviewer had. (I’m just happy not to be in any hospital.)
One of the best supporting performances given in this reviewer’s recollection is gifted the viewer in this criminally intense film. No irony it is in a role where a care provider becomes the ultimate sadist, the ultimate “inquisitor”. Delivered by Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, the role is that of a character conjured up purely in the mind of our protagonist, representing a secret fear George Grieves has sustained by the guilt felt over whites once dominating blacks. Sustaining this interpretation is the very name accorded Hilton-Jacobs’ role, Mandingo.
Bear in mind one factual development and the scriptwriter’s elegant way of creating its foreboding, is the actual “iatrogenic disease” wrought upon our hero by incredibly bad medicine. The foretelling even adds to the viewer’s dilemma in trying to figure out what particular plane of the parallelism created is manifest, fears driving drug-induced hallucination or actual reality (not a contradiction in terms for this movie.)
Cross play between imaginary extra-marital exploits of Grieves’ wife (beautiful Kathleen York) with his offending doctor, Dr. Sharazi, played by Cas Anvar; with the concocted fantasy indulged by himself with a seductive nurse, all come to represent efforts within delusion to build a credible parallel for the viewer crescendoing to denouement. Is this all conspriracy against the poor man by collaboration of wife with doctor utilizing perverted players?
Actually that would be the easy way out, that more sane anyway. Ultimately the worse case scenario is realized, something like being buried alive without the prospect of delivering death, only worse. Until….what all the arsenal of symbolism employed, even that of the Tree of Life (most interestingly placed) come to resolve in contextual climax.
A movie where more thought is to be expended in resolving meanings after viewing than while.
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August 26th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Please James, just tell us how you really feel about the film. I understand that it was successful according to you, but what makes it so successful? Please expand your thoughts for me.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Were I to do this anymore than I have, wouldn’t that reach beyond the province of a review, giving too much away? It’s my understanding a review
is to interest, not be an explacacion de text.
For the reason I believe this movie to be successful is in the ultimate
way in which it unravels the reality from the unreality. Knowing any
particulars of which, the ending becomes predictable and lessened in
dramatic effect from denouement to end.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Truthfully, you write a lot but say practically nothing here. You’d be a great politician.
August 26th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Maybe your problem with me is simply one of grasp. Or perhaps, anti-intellectualism. If I want the mundane or redundant, I’ll read reviews
like yours that mirror a number of other reviews, offering hardly anything
new. That’s not what I want to do. And I don’t give one tinker’s damn if
you don’t like it.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:33 am
Wow, I see I offended you. This I didn’t mean to do. Does bashing someone elses reviews feel like the right thing to do after someone expresses their inner-thoughts? It is just that, after reading your review, I had no idea what the movie was about. No synopsis? Everyone has their own style and your reviews are, indeed, well-written. I just feel your thoughts are muddled.
P.S. Your last comment to my most recent review (Incident On and Off A Mountain Road) seemed positive. So, this putting down of my reviews with lack of hesitation just seems a way of blowing off steam to me.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
You didn’t mean to offend me?!! You were just “expressing inner-thoughts”! Let me offer you a little advice: stay out of sports bars. Men don’t come
there for “inner-thoughts”, the very thing that might have driven them there in the first place.
As for as the movie, I’m writing a review to attract movie-goers to see it, not resolve nor express its “inner-thoughts” element or whatever. If you didn’t know, that’s the job of the reviewer. If you’re muddled, perhaps it’s because you simply don’t know what to do with novel ideas you can’t grasp with catch phrases triggering understandings already redundant to that which has already been observed numerous times.
I write to fill in voids other reviewers have left, not mirror what’s already available to the viewer. That’s the reason for the selections I make, to avoid movies where review coverage I feel is ample. It’s true I paid respect to a positive in the review you mention as a professional courtesy. Colleagues on a professional plane don’t dump on colleagues. That doesn’t mean I wholeheartedly buy either your style or priorities. I don’t. Call it a philosophical difference.
The only problem is, you demonstrate no tolerance for mine while I have
for yours…at least until you decided to take the dump. All matters that will stick around vastly longer than “steam”, as obstacles between us, if you wish…or you could grow to the occasion a bit more and show more breadth.
Anyone here will find I’m quite open to advice and improvement if the offers of help are valid and sincere, coming from professional well-meaningness and not just the product of poor reading skills and/or someone simply resorting to “inner-thoughts”. Your knowledge base, if that’s to what you’re referring, is already there. I want to add something to it.
In truth, your approach may have more demand ultimately than mine, you
might find a market faster and be more successful. Still, that’s not my
yardstick. Once you can grasp that perhaps we can get along, I hope so.