15. Session 9 (2001, Anderson)
By Eivind Langdal
15th October 2009

It is fitting that Session 9 begins with the main characters getting a tour of its central location: a mental hospital that has been shut down for over 15 years. The reason for the tour is that a clean-up professional Gordon and his associate Phil have made a bid to remove the asbestos in the building in two weeks. As they are shown around the place, director Brad Andersen subtly builds the atmosphere for the coming events in this straight-to-video flick (which gained a small cult following after its release). One could imagine quite a deal going down in such a place. Indeed, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Andersen discovered the hospital and then wrote this film around it. If Stephen King had gotten there before him, I might have been reviewing a film based on his book right now. As a location for a horror story, it fits like a hand in a glove.

In addition to Gordon and Phil, the clean-up crew consists of three additional guys: Hank, who is now with Phil’s ex (much to Phil’s dismay), Mike, a law school dropout who carries quite a tool belt of useful information, and Jeff, Gordon’s nephew, who is fresh in the game, but eager to learn (he does however suffer from nyctophobia, or fear in the dark, which is a safe sign he will find himself in a location draped in darkness later in the film).

Because of Gordon’s insistence to do the job in such a short time, the team is going to have to work very hard. But they don’t. Oh no, the guys pretty much spend almost the entire film having lunches and breaks, all the while carrying odd conversations about stuff like the history of the mental hospital or how to be a “true professional” in the cleaning field (which is delivered like it’s what kids want to be if their plans of becoming a superhero fails). I think some of these scenes are supposed to be deep, tense or profound (or something like that), but thanks to the bad acting by almost everyone involved, these scenes come off like five guys from wherever decided to write a bad horror film and upload their rehearsal tapes up to YouTube (Stephen Gevedon, who co-wrote the screenplay and plays Mike, is the only one who actually seems like a professional actor).

Maybe it would help if Anderson hadn’t decided to shoot the film with a digital camera, because, unlike David Lynch with Inland Empire (a film I don’t necessarily like, but admire the look of), he simply doesn’t possess the ability to use it in sort of advantageous way. The Blair Witch Project was another film made with a camera that made the film looked cheap, but there was a point to it, and the less-than-perfect image added to the atmosphere of the film. In Session 9, it distracts.

There’s much else in Session 9 that distracts too. One could tell the film didn’t have the largest of budgets. Sure, criticizing that may seem more like bullying than anything else, but if you have a vision you can’t afford, you either find another vision or you get the money. Whereas a film like 12 Angry Men takes advantage of its limited location, Session 9 struggled to engage me once I realized that it was going to have an ending that its budget couldn’t afford. As I turned out, I was more right than I realized, as the final reel of the film is so disappointing that it is a shame the film started so well.

Oh yes, Session 9 promises a lot in its beginning. The aforementioned tour of the mental hospital is creepy without ever seeming to even try to be creepy, and as I watched the scene, I started to think, “This could really be something”. And then the film went right down the drain. It’s a shame too; because a scene where Hank comes back to the hospital at night is so intensely scary I actually considered turning the film off. That’s actually true. It’s because of this kind of double edged sword I watch horror films: on one side, I almost can’t take it because I’m so scared, but on the other side, I want to keep watching because I’m so engaged. After all, isn’t the desire to be engaged why we watch movies in the first place?

What really bugs me about the film is that the aforementioned scene with Hank is creepy without using anything that could have cost any money. It’s simply a man alone in a long and dark corridor. Why couldn’t the rest of the film be like that? Anderson is a skilled director, and he has the ability to turn the simplest of scenes into something incredibly scary, and yet he still grasps for a plot he can’t control and an ending he can’t make good.

The problem with Session 9 isn’t that it’s good for most of the running time and then suddenly falls over in the third act. No, it’s a worse kind of film: the kind where the first half fools you into thinking it’s going to be great, because, by that point, it is great; but by the time the second half kicks in, you end up disappointed. Or at least I did. I am aware there are lots of people who like the film more than me. But I just couldn’t get beyond the bad acting or the sometimes-terrible script.

How is the script terrible? Well, because it pretty much writes its own obstacles. At one point in the movie, the team agrees that none of them should come there alone at night. Why do they do that? They don’t give a reason. Sure, it’s natural that people shouldn’t be walking around in such a creepy place in the middle of the night, but in the scene where this is stated, it is said in a way that implies the characters know something odd is going on in the hospital. That is true; something odd is going on in the hospital, but that early in the film, they don’t know that yet.

So why write it in? It certainly doesn’t make any sense on a dramatic level. After all, if the characters agree to not visit the mental hospital at night, they’re going to do it in the day. Now, maybe it’s just me, but who the hell sets most of the action in a horror film in the day? How the hell is that going to be scary? Even demons were never that scary in the light. Still, I’d take demons in the light any day before David Caruso anyway. Christ, this guy is a bad actor. After I saw this movie, I looked up Caruso on YouTube and found a montage of him putting sunglasses while spouting bad one-liners at a frequent rate in C.S.I., and I couldn’t stop laughing of the ridiculousness.

It’s sad that this film isn’t as good as it could have been. The scenes where Mike sits in the basement and listens to sessions with former mental patients are incredibly tense and well written. If the rest of the film had been like those scenes (or the one with Hank in the basement), it would have been a masterpiece. But it’s not like those scenes, so it will have to settle with my rating of it as “lost potential”.