Review: Session 9


A group of asbestos cleaners are given an assignment to clean up an abandoned former psychiatric institution. The leader of the group Peter Mullan tells his employer that they can be in and out in a week, something co-worker David Caruso feels is way too much for them to handle. It’s not long before the guys all start to crumble under stress, with Mullan plagued with guilt over his strained marriage, Stephen Gevedon becoming obsessed with audio tapes of the psychiatric sessions that explain the film’s title, etc. Meanwhile, resident a-hole of the bunch Josh Lucas (who has shacked up with Caruso’s ex and likes to taunt him over it) appears, disappears, and then re-appears…but isn’t quite the same. A fantastic mullet-sporting Brendan Sexton III plays the youngest of the cleaners who is also afraid of the dark, whilst Paul Guilfoyle is the guy who hires them for the gig.



This 2001 genre flick from director Brad Anderson (the romance “Next Stop Wonderland”, the Halle Berry crime/thriller “The Call”) and co-writer/actor Stephen Gevedon gets a bit of love from critics. Personally I think it’s a waste of a few solid character actors and a terrifically creepy location at the service of a dull, slow-moving story. Although it starts off with an interesting wrinkle on something very old, giving us a bunch of cleaners for protagonists (something I’ve only seen before in a genre film with the awful “Graveyard Shift”) and placing them into your standard spooky rundown institution, the results ultimately aren’t up to snuff.



The central location suggests something fascinatingly disturbing to be uncovered, but it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting at the end of the day. The whole thing is a bit thin, and after a while character behaviour becomes implausibly inconsistent too. Either pieces of the script are missing or it’s just a bit thin and incoherently told to begin with. Whatever the reason, I checked out pretty early in this and twiddled my thumbs for much of the length. Most of the performances can’t be faulted (Scottish actor Mullan is especially good), though David Caruso is his usual wooden self.



A great-looking location (a real former mental hospital) is misused in this slow-moving, ultimately underdone flick that doesn’t remotely satisfy. It’s all a bit vague and it ends up a bit of a mess, too. I didn’t really like this one much at all, and the comparisons some people make to “The Shining” are just insulting.



Rating: C-

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