Session 9 (dir. Brad Anderson)
Jeff: What’s your point?
Henry: Just have an exit plan, dude. You stick with this job too long, it’ll mess you up, man. It gets inside you—the stress.
A team of contractors are hired to remove asbestos from an abandoned psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts. Things get worse from there. It’s a simple premise, but one that could have some promise. You have your script, you hire some actors, find a location, and then shoot your picture. Brad Anderson and co-writer/actor Stephen Gevedon wrote a fine screenplay. The cast that was assembled is very solid: Scotland’s Peter Mullan, a pre-CSI: Miami David Caruso, Josh Lucas as a world class Masshole, Brendan Sexton III only a few years off from Welcome to the Dollhouse.
And the location? Why bother with soundstages and set dressing when you have an abandoned asylum right there in the Danvers State Hospital? The location is already imbued with a history and eerie presence that’s hard (and expensive) to fake. Abandoned equipment; walls, ceilings, and floors in complete disrepair; graffiti everywhere. And it’s not like anyone but Essex County teenagers are using it for anything but necking and getting high in, anyway, so why not shoot your movie on 2001 era DV cameras before the complex gets torn down and turned into luxury apartments?
The film is a potent mix of working class realism and psychological horror. The team led by Mullan’s character Gordon are under pressure to finish the job within a week in order to secure a 10,000 dollar bonus that all of them desperately need. All of them face serious health risks simply doing the job. The dangers posed by contact with toxic chemicals–invisible particles getting inside and destroying you–mirrors the threat of supernatural possession that pervades the film’s second half. Session 9 gets its title from the audio tapes that Gevedon’s overeducated character Mike discovers and listens to. They are recordings of the psychiatric sessions of Mary Hobbs, a patient affected with Dissociative Identity Disorder, that the characters in the film connect to “Satanic Ritual Abuse Syndrome–it was big in the 80s.” As Mike makes his way through the sessions, the crew begin to see, hear, and experience strange and worse events.
Critics connect the film to The Shining, and the comparison is quite evident: the single location, the limited cast, the atmosphere that goes from ominous to oppressive. The film loses me a little with its ending, but everything that comes before it is well worth your time.
oliveresque 