Postponed Movie Night this week so I could catch the France Portugal game, as in Euro 2020, and I'm glad I did because Christ what a drama that first half was, but there's no more football now until Saturday and after just about healing the emotional and mental scars that Race 3 left me with, and Golden Shoes did nothing too soothe, I'm moving on to FTW week with a movie that actually, genuinely, sounds interesting! Caller ID: Entity "A sci-fi conspiracy thriller, based on real phone messages and testimonials from victims of mind control technology." Oooh, I know right? So let's find out if they fuck it up or we we just discovered an underground cult classic.
Friends; Miles (James Duval) and Noah (Nathan Bexton), and vague acquaintances of the pair, Tristan (Triton King), and Dale (Denny Kirkwood) sign up to study Psychopathology under the virtual guidance of Dr. Adam Whitney (Douchan Gersi). The course promises to be unique, special, limitless according to the Dean of Admissions (Peter Greene) but the trio are forbidden to discuss their actions or details of the course with others and even each other. Dale is instructed to build miniature cameras for the purpose of studying human behaviour patterns, Miles is instructed to build sensors to measure fluctuations in the bodies energy fields, Tristan is instructed to study the relation between bio-plasma and human DNA and Noah is just instructed to memorize images he is subjected to carefully so that he may recall them on command later and the images are all of a traumatising nature. Noah immediately begins to struggle with course confiding in Miles that he is having problems, and later at a bar when Dale tries to bury the hatchet between the pair over an old, historic fall out they rebuke him causing him to leave. Meanwhile the Dean appears to be having some trouble with an ex-student, Cheryl and accusations of sexual harassment... Noah visits Dr Whitney and it appears Dr Whitney has began to implement some kind of subliminal control over Noah, causing him to lose concentration when he begins to recite a Bible verse, and after leaving Noah begins to hallucinate. Later, at his meeting with Dr Whitney, Miles is asked if he has heard from Noah and Miles reveals that he hasn't heard from Noah in days. Miles then moves on to the next stage of the course, and after picking up, Gemini (Roxy Saint), a Prostitute, tests a device on her that creates sexual orgasm in the brain from waveforms alone, but it appears to be too powerful and she ends up tearing out her own hair before passing out. Noah phones Dale at 4 in the morning and demands he meet him at what looks like an abandoned construction site. Whilst there he gives Dale a tape of recordings he has been collecting which are private recordings from an online group detailing accounts of psychological torture they have been subjected to. Miles visits Dr Whitney and tries to quit the project, revealing that the experiment actually killed Gemini... I thought she was actually a proper character?... but Dr Whitney won't let him leave and instead reveals that they are having trouble with a former student but using the technology they have developed, introducing Dale at this point who will help them, they will track that student; Cheryl, down. Dale is given a weird mask by Dr Whitney and goes to met a girl called Jeanie (Elissa Dowling) who lives and talks to pigeons, he drives her to a secluded trailer and uses a similar device Miles used to bring her to orgasm, killing her, and then he... masturbates over her dead body. Ok this has gotten NSFW... After Dale leaves Tristian arrives and retrieves the dead body and it appears, on instructions from Dr Whitney, he is analysing the bodies after death. Dale and Noah meet again and it's clear that Noah is losing grip on reality, believing his eye has been implanted. He gives Dale another tape and the pair split. Back at the lab, Tristian uses his phone to access restricted files that show a former student who quit the class being killed by answering a phone call playing a frequency tone. Unbeknownst to him, Dale witnessed the whole thing on camera, and Tristan gets a phone call sending him into a fit, just barely surviving his van being crushed underneath a train. Later, Noah bludgeons an innocent bystander to death, now fully under the control of Dr Whitney's mind control techniques, and when he goes to see Noah he leaves with Noah in a safe place; all the recordings he has made so far and when back at home he has a fit causing his eye to explode, presumably dying. Tristan meets an undercover journalist from the victims (of psychological torture) channel and is giving his testimony over the experiments Dr Whitney is carrying out and his tracking of Cheryl when Dale bursts into the compound looking for him but after a brief chase they manage to escape and Tristan hands the journalist all the data he's been able to obtain and drops him off at a medical facility, giving him instructions on how to retrieve everything else. But when Tristan tries to escape via train, he is followed by Dale who plays a soundwave sending him into a fit. Dale, having an argument with himself comes to the conclusion that they... or he... has to destroy all the evidence, all the records in order to survive and retrieving Noah's collection he goes about destroying it. Interspersed throughout the movie are flashback scenes and it's difficult to keep track of what is present and what isn't.. but in one flashback scene, whilst Dr Whitney is carrying out an experiment on Cheryl she appears to vanish and I think the hypothesis is that Cheryl has literally become a waveform, travelling from video to video, soundwave to soundwave? Meanwhile Miles is still in this movie and he turns up abducting Cheryl (Carrie Hayes) who appears to have already been held prisoner somewhere before now and leads her to Dr Whitney who tries to shoot her but his bullets have no effect on her... then in a change of heart Miles turns the gun on Dr Whitney killing him as Dale rushes to his aid. Miles walks away and suggests that Dale does the same but back at his place Dale has a fit, presumably dying, bought on by a waveform. In the closing scene Tristian is seen putting posters up for the victims channel, now not able to walk.
...erm... ok? So were they being controlled by Dr Whitney or not? Was it all Cheryl all along? I'm not entirely sure I completely followed everything in this movie... maybe if they stopped flitting backwards and forwards in time it would have made it easier to follow? Or maybe they were making it up as they went along?
Ok, so the random nature of the plot development aside for the moment, this movie was... ok... but it really began to lose me towards the end. I feel like they were building up a potentially quite clever narrative with the mind control stuff, but then they didn't quite really know where to go with it next and then it all got a bit silly and went off the rails. I feel like this had potential, it could have been something clever, something slick, something intelligent but they couldn't quite get a good grasp on the source material and drive the plot in the right direction and so it all just fell apart.
Aside from the above point, I thought the cinematography was actually pretty good. It's obvious they were going for a kind of glitchy, fast paced narrative to tie into the nature of malicious, intrusive broadcasts, and the cinematography really helped to enhance that. There was some really good scenes shot at interesting and impressive angles although the reliance on sped up footage to reinforce the psychological breakdown of the main characters got a bit tiresome and repetitive.
The acting for the most part was ok, it was low budget, no doubt, and some of the acting really did nothing to cloak that fact but in moments the main characters did a really great job. All four of the leads were convincing when called upon to display their psychological breakdown, it was only when they were trying to have normal conversations that they looked a bit wooden and out of place, but broadbrushly they did a good job. Nathan Bexton as Noah in particular stood out for me and it's a shame he wasn't given the chance to flesh out the character more.
However aside from these positives the confusing, entangled, under-developed plot really damaged this film and it seemed to just dissipate until it was just a sequence of scenes shot one after each other. Perhaps this was to further drive home the fragile mental state of the characters but it was at the expense of the central plot and I'll be honest I hadn't got a clue what was actually happening in the last 15 - 20 minutes of the film. It could have really used just a little bit more foundation and really dialled back less on an audience expectation that you would just know what certain bits meant and what certain characters motives actually were, and it seemed like every loose end lead to a dead end and then that wasn't developed on further. Couple that with things seemingly happening off screen and any foundation had just crumbled down.
If everything wasn't so loosely constructed, and if there had been a bit more development I think they could have really had a quality picture on their hands here. The camera work was good, the aesthetic was driving the movie in the right direction, the four main characters seemed at least mildly proficient in the field of acting, which is unusual for these FTW films, but it felt like a spaghetti dinner and every strand of spaghetti just lead you to a empty, meaningless void that did nothing to explain what was going on. Maybe after 2 or 3 watches, picking up stuff you might have missed on a first watch it might make more sense, but I still feel suspiciously like they just made it up as they went along. 2 out of 5.
