The Dead Center: The Cinematic 7-10 Split, Redux

In the course of writing this thing, I’ve run across a fair number of films that don’t land as well as they could because their ambitions outstrip their budget. So-called “genre” films (as opposed to “serious” films, which usually means “drama,” which is in no way itself a genre, no sir, whoops got carried away there), whether they’re horror or science fiction or fantasy, generally don’t get lavishly funded once you step away from the blockbuster exceptions, and they’re also the ones pushing suspension of disbelief the hardest. So they’ve got to work harder to maintain audience buy-in to their conceit, and do it with fewer resources than your garden-variety drama.

To my mind, then, the most effective low-budget horror films are the ones that don’t try to go too big by relying on effects-heavy setpieces that they can’t afford to pull off convincingly. I’m also sort of biased because I think I’ve established to a tiresome degree by now that I think good horror is more about mood and atmosphere and caring about the characters than gore or showy special effects, and those are things you don’t need a big budget to get. Case in point: The Blair Witch Project cost $60,000 to make, and I’d argue it’s better and scarier than films that cost more than 100 times that.

So, long story short, I’m here for small-budget indie horror because when it’s good, when the people making the film know what they’re doing, its constraints lead it to embody what I consider to be virtues in horror film. The Dead Center is a good example of this - it’s subdued, realistic, and suitably creepy. It’s not without its problems, but it works really well within its limitations.

It’s been a long day for Dr. Daniel Forrester, but you get the sense that every day is a long day for him. He works in an emergency psychiatric care ward, and he cares probably a little too much. He’s the kind of doctor who bends the rules in an effort to make a difference, and he’s just discovered that it’s cost him his admitting privileges - he’s authorizing more extended stays than their budget can sustain, all because he wants to help everyone, damn the cost. And on top of that, they’ve just gotten an odd new referral - a John Doe who just sort of…showed up…in the main hospital, with no memory of who he is or how he got there.

It’s also about to be a long day for Dr. Edward Graham. He’s with the medical examiner’s office, and he’s been called to the same hospital to do an examination on an apparent suicide victim…

…except that he can’t, because the body - a John Doe - has disappeared from the morgue.

The basic structure of the movie is one that bounces back and forth between Forrester and Graham, each trying to figure out what happened to their particular John Doe. Forrester tries whatever method he can to help his get his memory back, and Graham drives all over the city tracing the last days of his. The rest of the film is an exercise in convergence, as their two stories come together. By and large, it all feels very real and grounded in a way that a lot of horror films get wrong - the hospital looks and sounds like an actual hospital, the psychiatric ward a constant hum of procedure underpinned by the shouting and crying and screaming of people in acute distress, the staff calmly going about their business, swimming through bedlam. These people really feel like they’re professionals tasked with an extremely difficult job in emergency psychiatric medicine and not the caricatures of doctors and nurses populating film and television, and it goes a long way toward selling everything that happens next.

This extends to the rest of the cast - everyone talks and acts like human beings, there’s very little outright exposition and for that matter, some cliches are nicely subverted. Forrester is very much the wild-card doctor who doesn’t play by the rules, and we see this more in his actions than in speeches, which is nice. But normally that character is played as the hero, as the one who was right all along, but here he pretty much keeps fucking everything up, which is what actually happens when you think you’re above procedure or that what you want outweighs everything else. And the administrator who is tired of his bullshit isn’t a soulless unfeeling functionary, she still has a considerable degree of empathy for him and doesn’t appear to relish what she has to do in response to his antics. She doesn’t seem like the rigid control freak this character usually is, she seems like someone who has to think about the big picture and has responsibilities that Forrester doesn’t. People talk in this film, they don’t make speeches, and the portrayal of the mentally ill strikes me as much more real and human than most films manage. As far as the world and the people in it, there were few false notes, with a couple of exceptions I’ll talk about more in a bit.

This naturalistic tone extends to the horror elements as well. The effects work is minimal, restricted to a little prosthetic and makeup work that highlights the unnaturalness of what’s going on without tipping over into rubber-suit territory, and some quick, almost-subliminal shots and sound work. Combined with a good sense of staging and editing, the film gets a lot of mileage out of very small gestures- flickering lights, open doors, the sound of gasping - that works very well in context to create a sense of dread that escalates as the film goes on. It’s good at giving us just enough to feel uneasy without overexplaining, relying instead on suggestion and picking its more dramatic moments carefully, building things slowly until the shit really hits the fan in the third act. The film is shot using lots of natural lighting, and music is used very sparingly to highlight specific moments. Even more impressive to me is the way other moments are well-served by silence employed to equally dramatic effect, so this isn’t a film with an intrusive soundtrack problem.

It’s got a good sense of scale as well - moving from Forrester and the interiors of the hospital to segments of Graham out and about in the city doing legwork, alongside aerial overhead shots of the city and traffic, serves to locate what’s happening in this one place, this single hospital, in a much larger setting. The film opens with a slow, almost languid overhead shot of an ambulance headed to the hospital, sirens and flashers on, but we’re so high up and far away that it’s mostly silent, only to zoom closer and slam down into the speed and noise and chaos of an ambulance with a dying passenger headed full-tilt for the emergency room. It’s sort of a nice summary of what this film is going to do over the course of its run - it’s going to start with little things, and then over time pull out and away to show you the real stakes. It sneaks up on you in that respect, and the third act gets pretty chilling as a result. The setting is quite different (well, sort of), but it reminds me a lot in tone and scope of a less-gothic Session 9 or a less-Lovecraftian Absentia. It’s not as good as either of those films, though, for a few reasons.

First, the grounding in reality works very much to the film’s benefit, but it also means that the couple of places it does depart from realism stand out pretty sharply by contrast, to the film’s detriment. It’s not really clear why Forrester has to be written as a troubled psychiatrist (and we learn that he’s troubled in a big ol’ chunk of exposition that reeks of “why is this person saying this stuff out loud to this other person like he doesn’t already know all of this?”) whose idealism interferes with his ability to do his job. It doesn’t really add much to the story and all of the same beats could be easily served by someone more professional. It’s sketched in just enough to make it stand out - in a more melodramatic picture, we’d accept someone like him right away because everyone’s sort of a caricature, hut here, where people are very much real people, it sticks out like a sore thumb even though it’s handled pretty realistically. Someone like him would have been fired a long time ago in this world, and the film isn’t entirely about him or his descent into madness, so it ends up being more distracting than anything else. As far as Graham goes, the character is just fine, pretty low-key and professional, but it’s a little hard for me to swallow the idea that a doctor from the medical examiner’s office would be able to just sort of drop everything to go chase down a missing John Doe, get access to crime scenes, and be permitted to interview people without law enforcement present. He feels less like a medical examiner and more like a detective, and that was a little distracting as well. Again, in a movie that didn’t feel so real, this would be pretty easily digested, but here it grabbed my attention immediately.

Second, there are also a couple of stumbles in how the story is laid out. The opening scene is striking, but from a story standpoint might have worked better later in the film, because it reveals an important detail right at the beginning. If  the film had opened on one story or the other, and worked in that scene later into the film, it would have hit harder. It’s another case where a mystery and gradual revelation is replaced with waiting for the characters to catch up to what we already know. and it takes some of the edge off.  And then, after a pretty unsettling third act that makes the stakes much more apparent, the very end of the film lands with a bit of a cliched thud - it’s anticlimactic and kind of obvious in a way that the rest of the film isn’t, and that’s disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think any of this undoes the film entirely - its low-key, naturalistic approach really benefits the film once it starts to turn the heat up, and it does a good job of building dread. It’s just a bummer when it works so well in so many ways that the shortcomings really stand out. But none of these things are a function of budget - it wasn’t like it was obvious that this wasn’t a hospital, the practical effects didn’t look cheap, the acting was solid throughout, and it created a sense of dread by getting us to care about people and then creating a vocabulary that would tell us when bad things were about to happen. Those are definite strengths that bear attending to. For its faults, I think there’s a lot to be learned from what this film does right. It’s just too bad that it ends up being a cinematic 7-10 split.

IMDB entry
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