The Dead CenterCaretakers must do no harm, but must also step back from the edge of the abyss before it pulls them into the darkness. The Dead Center is a psychological horror movie about a therapist named Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth) who takes in a semi-catatonic patient named Michael Clark (Jeremy Childs) for observation at the mental health facility where he works. But Michael's stay coincides with an escalation of unfortunate accidents that befall Daniel's colleagues and patients, leading Daniel to consider that Michael might be the cause. And what Daniel doesn't know is that Michael is a suicide who has apparently come back from the dead.
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Daniel is a therapist who is motivated by giving people the chance to recover from their past troubles, even when they would otherwise not be eligible for care. This provokes his otherwise level-headed boss, Sarah Grey (Poorna Jagannathan), who chastises Daniel for breaking protocol by admitting a patient who turned down service before, and demands that he vet his patients through her from now on. In spite of this, Daniel takes Michael in; this is the first of many rebellions that ultimately lead to tragedy, despite his good intentions. Little is known about Daniel or of the characters in The Dead Center, save that Daniel had a traumatic event in his childhood that has engendered sympathy for him from Sarah. Their past is only hinted at, but there are a few clues that Daniel may have experienced what it is like to be a patient in a facility like this. This comes across in Carruth's performance, which may be subdued but hints at a drive to do right by those who need help and for those who need a little bit of kindness, even if it means bending the rules. But Daniel's good intentions get turned against him in Michael, who ominously mutters that he tried to kill the "darkness" within himself, but that it brought him back to life, and that he has "killed". Michael only has the scar tissue to suggest past injuries, but the audience has the knowledge that Michael was rolled up on a gurney into the morgue within the first few minutes of the film with unquestionably lethal wounds. Michael would have been autopsied by a county coroner named Edward Graham (Bill Feehely), except that when he arrived at the morgue, the body was missing. Subsequently, Ed begins his own bit of sleuthing to discover not just what happened to the body, but what led to Michael's death in the first place. He visits the hotel room where it happened, and manages to uncover a couple of clues that the police suspiciously failed to identify. Even when he brings this evidence to his contact in the police department, they seem almost indifferent to it, teasing at some kind of conspiracy afoot. Ed goes so far as to visit Michael's parents, discovering that Michael killed his wife in a fire, and that he was into some kind of occult myth about a spiral-faced demon called the "mouth of death". And when Ed recalls that Michael had a spiral-shaped wound etched into his body--as well as the one he found at the bottom of the blood-filled bathtub at the hotel--he begins to understand that Michael's disappearance heralds something far more sinister on the horizon.
This film grabbed my attention because I've been a big fan of Shane Carruth's movies--this movie is directed by Billy Senese--and have anxiously awaited something new. But The Dead Center isn't a mysterious or poetic film of quiet contemplation about the greater mysteries of the universe, like Upstream Color, or a smart and savvy science fiction film about time travel, like Primer. Instead, it deals with a strange and creeping evil that these protagonists are completely ill-equipped to handle. Ed is certainly smart enough--and lucky enough in his investigation--to follow the thread back to Michael, but even he fails to prepare for the supernatural evil that has somehow found a home in Michael. And Daniel is troubled and, unfortunately, too rebellious for his own good, or apparently anyone else's. Michael isn't so much menacing as he is unsettling. He occasionally spooks Daniel (and the audience) by remaining deathly still only to suddenly take in a big breath of air, or start shaking violently--which somehow coincides with a brown out of electricity--before lunging at someone and infecting them with his "darkness". Michael--and what is inside him--is essentially a plague, and nothing Daniel, Ed, or anyone else could do would stop it, because they can't understand it. It appears that Michael may have been like these men and tried to fight this darkness himself by learning about its place in history. He kept articles and photos and historical accounts of terrible mass deaths that spread back thousands of years, all with corpses that have their mouths stretched open in agony. After Michael's stay in the hospital begins, people start turning up dead the same way, and it isn't long before Daniel realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--but one he isn't ready to own. But no one has all of the pieces of this puzzle at any one time, and so everyone seems to fall prey to some mistake in dealing with this force at some point or another. Perhaps it is too obvious, but the "mouth of death" is reminiscent of COVID-19 as is it's devastating and uncontrolled rampage across the world. What can one person do when faced with something so deadly by themselves? The Dead Center bleakly says "little to nothing".
Recommended for: Fans of a creepy and mysterious horror movie where the horror is accented by the increasing sense of powerlessness the protagonists have in the face of increasing evil and destruction. The Dead Center wears the uniform of a compelling, low-budget horror movie, that relies on building suspense and punctuating the action with the occasional jump scare.
This film grabbed my attention because I've been a big fan of Shane Carruth's movies--this movie is directed by Billy Senese--and have anxiously awaited something new. But The Dead Center isn't a mysterious or poetic film of quiet contemplation about the greater mysteries of the universe, like Upstream Color, or a smart and savvy science fiction film about time travel, like Primer. Instead, it deals with a strange and creeping evil that these protagonists are completely ill-equipped to handle. Ed is certainly smart enough--and lucky enough in his investigation--to follow the thread back to Michael, but even he fails to prepare for the supernatural evil that has somehow found a home in Michael. And Daniel is troubled and, unfortunately, too rebellious for his own good, or apparently anyone else's. Michael isn't so much menacing as he is unsettling. He occasionally spooks Daniel (and the audience) by remaining deathly still only to suddenly take in a big breath of air, or start shaking violently--which somehow coincides with a brown out of electricity--before lunging at someone and infecting them with his "darkness". Michael--and what is inside him--is essentially a plague, and nothing Daniel, Ed, or anyone else could do would stop it, because they can't understand it. It appears that Michael may have been like these men and tried to fight this darkness himself by learning about its place in history. He kept articles and photos and historical accounts of terrible mass deaths that spread back thousands of years, all with corpses that have their mouths stretched open in agony. After Michael's stay in the hospital begins, people start turning up dead the same way, and it isn't long before Daniel realizes that he's made a terrible mistake--but one he isn't ready to own. But no one has all of the pieces of this puzzle at any one time, and so everyone seems to fall prey to some mistake in dealing with this force at some point or another. Perhaps it is too obvious, but the "mouth of death" is reminiscent of COVID-19 as is it's devastating and uncontrolled rampage across the world. What can one person do when faced with something so deadly by themselves? The Dead Center bleakly says "little to nothing".
Recommended for: Fans of a creepy and mysterious horror movie where the horror is accented by the increasing sense of powerlessness the protagonists have in the face of increasing evil and destruction. The Dead Center wears the uniform of a compelling, low-budget horror movie, that relies on building suspense and punctuating the action with the occasional jump scare.