Tag: psychological thriller

Flashback

Posted on by Paul Risker

Almost nine years on from his faux documentary, The Conspiracy (2012), director Christopher MacBride returns with the Canadian psychological and sci-fi thriller Flashback. Fred Fitzell (Dylan O’Brien) stands on the precipice of adulthood. In a committed relationship with his long-term girlfriend Karen (Hannah Gross), he faces the pressure of a new corporate job, and his mother’s ailing health. When a chance encounter with a man from his youth results in terrifying flashbacks, Fred tries to piece together the fragmented memories of taking an experimental drug called Mercury. Becoming obsessed with finding out what happened to Cindy (Maika Monroe), a girl from his High School who went missing, the struggle to hold his life together threatens both his relationship and his job.

As with The Conspiracy, which sees two filmmakers go in search of their subject, a conspiracy theorist who mysteriously disappears, the motivational drive of Flashback’s story is also to discover the fate of a missing person. MacBride shifts his focus from the external to the internal. In as much as Fred becomes obsessive about what happened to Cindy, the story is as much about the choices and possible outcomes that have shaped his life. If the characters are searching for one another or themselves, it’s a reflection of a filmmaker whose developing his own creative language and identity.

An enjoyable hyper-energetic piece of filmmaking, MacBride flirts with the idea of what it could mean if we control our sensory responses. Cindy says to Fred after taking a weaker dose of Mercury, “There’s so much to explore if you don’t give in to the pleasure.” It’s an intriguing idea that brings definition to the story, underpinning it with an intent to develop ideas and themes. Questions of what lies beyond our perception, and the hidden mysteries of the mind are tantalising, offering any storyteller compelling, creative and entertaining material. Unfortunately the limited execution here leaves us to sense a debilitating sparseness to the storytelling, and the feeling that it gets lost in its own rabbit hole.

In spite of these qualms, MacBride is able to engage us with the emotional hook of Fred’s relationship with both Karen and his mother, portrayed with a sensitivity and gentleness, even if guilty of being a little saccharine. This is offset by the less optimistic idea of our shared existential crisis.

Sitting on a rooftop overlooking the city at night, Cindy tells Fred, “I don’t want to be like them. Locked in a prison that they’ve forgot that they’re in. Look at all of them, running around, pretending to know exactly who they are and why they’re doing what they’re doing.”

It’s a clichéd thought, yet that doesn’t make our shared existential crisis any less true. During the pandemic the idea of “normality” has been on our minds, and we have a choice. We can return to the “old normality” or seek out a “new normality.” Cindy’s words and Fred’s piecing together his fragmented puzzle feeds into the dilemma that occupies our present day reality.

The idea of sensory control, and the planes we can explore that lie beyond our perception are only a dream. For now we must use imagination to ponder these possibilities. It’s a grandiose idea that elevates the discussion about “normality”, to the hypothetical of, what if we could expand the possibilities of the human experience?

MacBride synchs his film with the timely question we should be asking ourselves: what do we want our collective futures to be? He retreats from any grand declaration to instead offer a simple thought. Fred’s fate proposes the idea that each of us has to create a space for ourselves. It’s one that should fulfil our needs to feel a sense of belonging, meaning and purpose, even if someone sat on a rooftop dreads the thought of being like us. We cannot control our collective “normality”, but we can control our personal sense of it.

Flashback is out on Sky Cinema and NOW on Friday, September 30th. On IMDB TV on Monday, January 3rd. Also available on other platforms.

The Ghoul

Posted on by mjbstaging

A police inspector investigating a bizarre shooting incident in a London house goes undercover as a mental patient to investigate his prime suspect: a psychiatrist. The nature of mental illness being what it is, after the policeman has gone undercover it becomes increasingly hard to distinguish whether he’s really a policeman undercover as a mental patient, as was initially suggested, or whether he is in fact an actual mental patient with delusions of being an undercover policeman.

The Ghoul was executive produced by Ben Wheatley who gave British actor-turned-director Gareth Tunley a small role in dirty gem Kill List (2011). The Ghoul weaves a complex web of relationships between policemen and colleagues, policemen and suspects, psychiatrists and patients. Real and assumed identities. And this web takes the form of a Möbius strip. As psychiatrist Morland (Geoffrey McGivern) explains it to his patient Chris (Tom Meeten), it’s a strip of paper twisted then joined so that if an insect were to land upon it and walk its length, it would come to be on the other side from where it was previously without in any way crossing over from one side to the other. Proceed for the same distance in the same direction again, and it would be back where it started. As pictured here:

In his role as a policeman, Chris has driven down by night from Manchester to London in order to help to investigate an attempted double shooting. Lengthy discussions with colleagues Jim (Dan Renton Skinner) and Jim’s partner Kathleen (Alice Lowe) point to Coulson (Rufus Jones), Chris assumes the role of a man with mental health issues and takes up counselling sessions with psychiatrist Fisher (Niamh Cusack) so as to gain access to Coulson’s file at her office. She passes him on to another psychiatrist, the aforementioned Morland, who is currently counselling Coulson.

Morland talks to Chris at great length about various obsessions including a bottle “of which the outside is the inside” and explains the Möbius strip. Meanwhile, Chris has been following Coulson around the streets. Eventually Chris finds himself driving from Manchester to London again, traversing the Möbius strip, back where the film started.

Like that other Möbius strip movie Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) this opens and closes with a point of view shot of a road from a car driving along it at night (those familiar with Lynch’s work will probably notice a resemblance between the road markings at the beginning of the 1997 film and the art work above). It has much in common too with B-movie thriller Shock Corridor (Sam Fuller, 1963) in which a Pulitzer-prize-hungry newspaper man goes undercover as an asylum inmate in order to solve a murder that has taken place there. While Shock Corridor plays out as a linear narrative, albeit one in which deluded characters occasionally shift into lucidity, The Ghoul constantly shifts in terms of the identities of its characters.

A number of questions are raised. Is Chris a cop or a loner with mental problems? Is Kathleen his superior on the force or the girl he’s fancied since his Manchester student days? Is Coulson the subject of an investigation or Chris’ best mate? These games the piece plays with its audience and the way it folds back upon itself are ultimately what make it worth seeing.

The Ghoul is out in cinemas across the UK on August 4th. It was made available on BFI Player the following month.