I like horror movies. I like movies that people can only describe as "fucked up" and things that most people run away screaming from. So when my coworker--another fan of the depraved arts of horror and gore--told me that there was a movie that killed a part of him that he is never going to get back, I became almost giddy at the prospect of being messed with to the point of suicide because of a goddamn movie. I mean, what really can it be that made not only him but the other two people I know who have seen it agree with him? This is going to be a magical experience, and I should probably do it when my roommate is out of state so he doesn't have to find me in the morning.
Sublime (2007) is a movie that I knew nothing about before being told it kills parts of souls that can never be retrieved. All I bothered to find out about it was this: it's a horror film from 2007 that takes place in a hospital and it published by Raw Feed, a film label I knew nothing about. I didn't know anything other than that. Didn't know who was in it, who directed it, who wrote it, who published it, NOTHING. I wanted no more outside information to sway my opinion of it because I was already so hyped up because this movie had the power to kill me inside, and the thought of that excited me because if a horror movie can actually do that it is achieving exactly what horror movies should do and have never been able to. And my hopes were so high. I was gleeful at the prospect of not being able to sleep for reasons other than insomnia.To catch you up to what you soon learn in the film, George Grieves as played by Thomas Cavanagh is turning forty, celebrating with his family comprised of Kathleen York as the wife, Shannah Collins as the daughter, Kyle Gallner as the son, and David Clayton Rogers as his brother among other friends, and going to the hospital the following day with his first ever colonoscopy. He gets there, meets the cute nurse Zoe played by Katherine Cunningham-Eves and the Persian doctor played by Cas Anvar. Something obviously goes horribly wrong and George is now slipping in and out of consciousness and more and more bizarre things are happening to him.
Now, the director of the film was one Tony Krantz who has produced many films and television shows, but only directed two--Sublime being the first. To him, I have to say this: brilliant. The directing was my favorite part of this film, but that may be damning it with faint praise, you haven't read the rest of the review yet, have you? The film starts with some kind of jerky camera work, where the camera is panning in a certain direction and you assume it's going to continue and it all of a sudden stops, so you have to look at the waterfall or the curtains to see if the movie froze or if it was deliberate--and it was wonderfully deliberate. Every last bit of directing, from the fuzzy grain added to half of the screen in some of scenes, and--someone has to explain this to me--how do you get fuzzy grain in the foreground but not in the background? Cinematographer Dermott Downs, I know cinematography and that's not something I'm used to. It was brilliant, perfectly sublime--a credit to its title.
The writer, Erik Jendresen, is an aspiring horror writer, it seems as he has written several, more than one of which has been published by Raw Feed. I need to say, the first half of the film was great. The chronology of the scenes kind of reminded me of John Mighton's stageplay turned screenplay Possible Worlds directed by Robert Lepage--a great movie in its own right. It weaves in between George in the hospital, dazed, confused, and sedated and the day of his birthday from the night of the party and gifts to seeing his children that morning. What happens in each time period somehow relates to what has just happened or what is going to happen and it really is a good way to tell a story such as this. I damned Rachel Getting Married for its slow pacing, but Sublime pulls it off. It's slow and painfully matriculated. It's similar to the pacing of the video game Silent Hill 2, where it doesn't need to be actually doing anything to scare you.
The music done by Peter Golub and Anthony Marinelli was mostly ambient with only a smallest hint of sinister intentions behind it, and it worked so well. Even the sound effects--actually, I should explain something first. Most of the time, unless I am viewing with friends, I will watch a movie on my laptop with my noise-canceling headphones on. The sound is all crystal clear, and I am unfortunately unaware of how it would sound coming out of my 19" Toshiba or even my 22" LCD TV in the living room, but some of the sounds--such as the pruning shears on the Home Shopping Network that always seems to be on in the hospital--are hugely enhanced and just makes your skin crawl.
The acting was pretty good, with very few exceptions. Very slow building but oppressive horror was pretty much flowing out of them. And I didn't expect to see the hottest sex scene of any movie I've ever seen, but goddamnit in a way.
And now that I'm done screaming about all the things I loved about the film, here's where I'm going to end it:
Shittier than the shittiest shit that ever fucking shit.
I mean, COME ON, the twist at the end was unexpected, to be sure, but it was fucking RETARDED. Controversies of the medical world being responsible for everything...are you kidding me? Thats the big horror? Playing off people's fears is one thing, but feeding them irrational fears and then preying on it--when it can be as quickly dismissed as it can be picked up--is just not how it's done. All the things I had loved about the movie--the directing, the writing, the cool sound effects--the only things that stuck around was the music and the decent acting and the rest of it went down the goddamn toilet. The last half hour to forty-five minutes of this adventure was crippling to the entire film. A twist is supposed to be shocking and end the film, not be shocking and then make you wish it never happened for the sake of entertainment. Even the "That's fucked up" notion stopped at the end, because it wasn't scary or discomforting anymore. This isn't just the gore-hound in me complaining either, because all the gore in the film took place at the very end; it was just completely unnecessary. When I am saying that grotesque torture, blood, and pain are unnecessary, you're doing something horribly wrong.
I know this just sounds horrible from a reviewer's standpoint, but I can't explain why all this negativity is so true without spoiling it, and that would be against what reviewers are meant to do. Not only that, but this movie in now way shape or form killed any part of me, unless you count the part of me that had hope that a horror movie could actually fucking do what horror movies are supposed to do.
-Evan "Dez" O'Connor
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