Skip to main content

Forgotten Film Friday: Session 9

 A retrospective by Brooks Rich

What scares you in a film? Is it a masked killer jumping out of the darkness with a knife? A ghost appearing in the blink of an eye? Someone having their skin peeled off slowly?

There are all kinds of scares in horror. Today, I want to focus on one of the most interesting: psychological horror. A subgenre that lives entirely in the mind. The best ones don’t show us much. They make us do the work. And sometimes, that’s far scarier than anything we could actually see.

A work crew is hired to clear asbestos out of the run-down Danvers State Hospital. There’s competition for the job, so Gordon, the crew’s leader, underbids with a two-week estimate—something he knows isn’t realistic. But they get the job. Then he cuts it to a week. Now they have no choice but to grind.

And then… something might start happening. There may be something in the dark of Danvers State. Or there may not be.

This is the brilliance of Session 9. The film lives and dies on its atmosphere. It’s cliché to say a location is a character, but this is one of the rare cases where it’s true. Danvers has its own energy—one we feel as viewers. This is a bad place, and no good comes from it.

I’m being careful not to give away too much, because going in blind is a big part of why this movie works.

There’s also a sadness running through Session 9. Not just in the history of Danvers, but in the men themselves. These are desperate guys who need this job to work out. There is no failure. Gordon, especially, carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. And maybe something in Danvers begins to affect him. To corrupt a broken man who’s already vulnerable.

The worst thing I could do is spell out exactly what happens. That’s not the point. My goal is to get you to discover whether this film works for you.

Some people will find Session 9 boring. I get that. If you’re looking for chainsaws, monsters, and buckets of blood, this probably isn’t your movie. You might get to the end and think, nothing happened. And that’s a completely valid reaction.

But for some of you, this film will get under your skin. Let it. It’s worth it.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Forgotten Film Friday: Absolute Power

Clint Eastwood stars as Luther Whitney, a jewel thief who works in the Washington DC area. One night while he is stealing from a mansion he is forced to hide in a secret compartment with a two way mirror. From there he observes a sexual rezendevous with the wife of a powerful man and the President of the United States Alan Richmond (Gene Hackman) Suddenly the president gets aggressive and while defending herself the woman is shot to death by two Secret Service agents. Luther manages to get away with a letter opener the woman stabbed the president with. At first Luther plans to flee the country. But when he is disgusted by a statement the president makes, Luther decides to expose the crime. I miss these kind of films. The nineties was a great time for thrillers exactly like this. They are not the flashiest films but they are also not obsessed with big action scenes. It's all plot and character with them. Sure this plot might be a little out there but Eastwood makes it work. He's...
1 comment
Read more

John Candy month

 What can you say about John Candy? He was a comic genius who was taken from us too soon. There were a lot of comedic heavyweights of the eighties and nineties but Candy stood above most of them. If there is a Mount Rushmore of comedy I imagine John Candy would be on it. For the month of July we are honoring this comic genius. 
Post a Comment
Read more

Oscar bait month

 The Academy Awards. That time of the year when everyone debates what movies are truly the best and there is never a consensus and no one is ever happy. A movie can be incredibly popular and then it wins a bunch of Oscars and suddenly it's overrated and not very good or downright bad. It happens every year. But for the month of April let's take a look at those films that had Oscars on their mind and instead fell flat on their faces. Now Oscar Bait is a term that can also be applied to winners or films that did score a bunch of nominations. For example Bradley Cooper's film Maestro is very much an Oscar Bait movie even though it had a decent awards season. I want to talk about the films that did nothing. That were early contenders then either faded away eventually or just plain crashed and burned. Oscar Bait's biggest failures. What wrong here with these? Was the movie poor? Did something else just have a dominant run? Or were politics involved? Maybe all of the above. S...
Post a Comment
Read more