Session 9 (2001)

I can't remember a movie in the past couple months I've been more pumped to see than Session 9. I thought Brad Anderson's follow-up to this, The Machinist (aka OMG Christian Bale is really skinny") was great, and from the hype I read on Netflix, IMDB and some "Greatest Horror Movie Lines" forum I can't remember the name of, I was convinced Session 9 was going to be even better. It wasn't. Pretty close, though.

While I was watching this movie, I started getting this feeling that the director in a way had a great horror movie before he even started shooting. I mean, he wrote a script about 5 men slowly going crazy while working in a creepy, old, and HUGE, abandoned mental institutition, without any special effects. His budget could be really low. He's working with a really small and manageable cast and crew. And he's been given access to shoot anywhere he wants in this old, scary ass building. That's about as ideal a scenario as I can think of. There's no possible way he could fuck this up. Is there? Maybe. But anyway, he doesn't.

At times, Session 9 was a nearly perfect psychological horror film, loaded with tingling atmosphere, dialogue, and visuals. Here are photos of Danvers State Asylum, where the movie was shot:



Chilling. Bleak. Damp. I could practically smell the mold as I watched. Gently paced and intelligently constructed nearly the whole way. But at times, it seemed to get a little confused as to what direction it wanted to lead the audience, especially toward the end, which was the only real disappointment. Although glacially paced at first, it was never boring. It builds as things get weirder and weirder until the slasher-movie finale, where everything's explained to be deceptively obvious.

The story is simple. 5 men arrive at the abandonded Danvers State Insane Asylum for a 5-day asbestos removal job. The leader of the team, Gordon (Peter Mullan), is under the emotional and financial stress of running a small company with a newborn daughter at home, so he agrees to do the job in a week because he desperately needs the money, even though his partner Phil (David Caruso) warns that it will take 3 weeks. As Gordon tours the asylum with the groundskeeper to get the scoop on the place (echoing The Shining here big time), he notices a lone wheelchair sitting in an infinitely long hallway, and a suddenly a voice that would make Hannibal Lector shit his pants, welcomes him, "Hello...Gordon." He shakes it off and the men get to work. The ridiculous deadline, coupled with a slowly growing malevolent presence in the building, strains the 5 men, bringing out their own fears and pitting them against each other. A series of taped interviews with a former patient, labeled Session 1-9, is discovered and played, and tells the story of a deeply disturbed woman whose split personality, Simon (the voice Gordon hears), told her to murder as a young girl.

The interviews are played throughout the film underneath the unnervingly quiet visuals, giving us clues, as the camera stalks down hallways, isolation chambers, and finally, the bloody corpses of the men as the building's truth is revealed.

Until the weak ending, the shocks are real and never feel cheap. The horror is never shown explicitly, only felt. One character, Hank, discovers a cache of gold coins hidden in a wall in the basement of the asylum, and as he starts to head back upstairs to join the others, he realizes he's not alone. Anderson does the suspense here perfectly. There's no music, only heavy breathing. And as Hank turns through the pitch black corridors, the steadicam shows us his point of view. He raises the flashlight towards the tunnel behind him and we see a dark figure at the other end, moving toward us. He freaks and starts running, tripping, and looking every which way. He turns a corner and Oh Shit! Of course something bad is there. It's all typical horror chase stuff, but it's just done SO WELL. There's also a bravura shot, I swear it blew me away, where the generator they're using to power the lights while they work, suddenly dies. Mullet-headed Jeff is afraid of the dark ("I got nyctophobia") and gets caught in the basement. As the lights that line the hallway go out one by one, he tries in vain to outrun the darkness that envelopes him, screaming. Hank disappears and is later found by Phil in the basement, in another great disturbing scene, severely shaken, hidden in the corner, and clad only in his undies.

The ending unfortunately is just a 15-minute Whodunnit? where the audience is trying to guess who the "bad guy" is. Throughout the film, it's unclear where exactly the danger is coming from. The men? The building? Which is fine and kept my interest. But as the ending draws nigh, Anderson seems to want us to think it's Mike (Stephen Gevedon, who also co-wrote the script), who stumbled upon the interview tapes and can't seem to stop listening to them. Did he go crazy listening to the tapes? And then all of a sudden the killer is supposed to be Phil, who keeps getting more aggressive towards Gordon, and then Jeff, and so on, etc. It's sort of lame because these implications are made through Gordon's hallucinations, not through the true character's action/dialogue, which would have earned genuine audience confusion. It's easy to throw in a conversation between two characters, then cut to a wide shot where only one of the characters is actually there, to show he's just imagining it all. That happened a little too much for my taste. Then finally we figure out who's gone nuts, and it's so obvious. Maybe Anderson thought it was too obvious, so he cluttered it with all that confusing stuff at the end. Sometimes you have to be PROUD of the obvious! There's a derivative psycho killer sequence and one too many pans of bloody pictures of Gordon's family, but then the very last line is classic, as the last patient interview (session #9) is heard underneath a sweeping exterior shot of the asylum. The doctor asks Simon where he lives, and the voice answers: "I live in the weak and the wounded...Doc." Brilliant. This suggests universality, and opens the film up to interpretation. Is Simon is the dark, murderous, urge inside anyone who feels attacked, emotionally or physically? Probably best not analyze that one too much, but it's just a great fucking line.

I couldn't really figure out exactly how the Simon presence related to Gordon, as his backstory didn't quite add up to someone who was "weak and wounded." The connection doesn't totally work for me. Other than that, and that flawed ending, it's a damn fine piece of psychohorror. Also my girlfriend and I jokingly referred to this movie as Brett Favre Loses It! because we really thought Peter Mullan looked like Brett Favre from certain angles.