Review – Session 9

This has got to be the winner of the all-time best shooting location award (or if it isn’t the hands-down winner, it’s certainly in the top ten). It’s set in the run-down husk of the Danvers Asylum, one of the locations where the pre-frontal lobotomy was pioneered, at least according to an “on location” documentary on the DVD version of the movie. Of course, the documentary also implies the place is genuinely haunted. If only the film-makers could have gotten a bit more of that sense of dread into the story itself. As it turned out, however, this is a close-but-no-cigar experience. The writers and director deserve a round of applause for taking the tired old “haunted asylum” rah-rah, bypassing the usual clichés and coming up with something a little more cerebral. I also appreciated the decision not to waste a lot of screen time explaining the exact nature of the antagonist; the “evil” was much creepier thanks to its vagueness. Thus this might have been a much better movie if the script had been a little more focused, dwelling more on character motivation and less on maintaining a largely uninteresting sense of mystery. Mildly amusing