Starting April 25, you can watch the paranoid thriller with horror elements «Double Blind». This is the feature directorial debut of Irishman Ian Gantt-Duffy. In the review below, we will tell you whether the audience will be drowsy while watching the movie.
Pluses:
a few really tense moments; technically, a decent performance; the creators at least try to surprise
Minuses:
a secondary uninteresting plot with uninteresting characters about an uninteresting experiment
«Double Blind»
Genre thriller, horror
Director Ian Gantt-Duffy
Starring Millie Brady, Pollyanna McIntosh, Akshay Kumar, Brenock O’Connor, Diarmuid Noyes, Abby Fitz
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2023
Website IMDb
Seven young people, three girls and four boys, whose names you won’t remember anyway, agree to test a new drug from a pharmaceutical company whose name has no meaning. For five days, the subjects will be fed mysterious pills that may cause certain side effects.
Later, a stern-looking, taciturn aunt in a snow-white robe slightly increases the dose, causing each of the participants in this dubious experiment to suffer from insomnia. But this could have been tolerated if one day the most talkative of the girls hadn’t fallen silent forever, floundering on the floor with a bloody face in an epileptic fit. The situation is complicated by the fact that the laboratory is closing for the next day, and each of the incredible six has literally stuck together.
«Double Blind», and it’s hard to wrap your head around this, has a 100% freshness score on Rotten Tomatoes, albeit based on only 8 reviews by film critics. This formally stunning result is not matched by, for example, such films as «Citizen Kane» (99%) or «The Godfather» (97%). It can only be believed if you think that all local actors were locked in a terrible bunker and promised to be released only after writing a favorable review of this movie. There is no other way to explain this perception of the Irish novelty.
At its core, the film is close to the particularly popular in the last decade, inspired by franchise «Saw» low-budget thrillers about bizarre quests and mysterious experiments in closed rooms («Escape Room» (2017), «Escape Room» (2019)), from which doomed dummies are trying to escape. Therefore, everything here is very secondary, practically devoid of any maneuvers for pleasant surprises.
What do the creators of this bloody entertainment usually offer on the screen? A group consisting of variously marginalized or just plain stupid characters (because normal people usually don’t end up in such places) find themselves in a death trap. The initiative is taken by an informal leader who will definitely make it to the end of the challenge and will want to expose the organizers of the nightmarish games. Someone must definitely be under suspicion because of the guesses that he is «a sent Cossack». Someone is likely to be burned alive.
Only if films of this kind can boast at least a variety of puzzle traps (which would surely make John Kramer laugh), then «Double Blind» lacks even this modest component.
Its authors rely primarily on the paranoid atmosphere of hopelessness, when the catastrophically sleep-deprived characters have ceased to understand what is reality and what is hallucination. Despite the fact that the viewer is completely indifferent to these strangers and, to be honest, not very nice people, watching them rush around in sterile corridors is boring.
In rare moments, Ian Gantt-Duffy, along with debut screenwriter Narayan van Male, manages to build up the suspense through some tense situations. But this revitalization looks more like cinematic somnambulism than a serious attempt to make the viewer clutch at his or her seat, let alone scare him or her.
At the same time, neither the symmetry of the frame, nor the distinctly cold color scheme, which is sometimes interrupted by aggressive red, nor the play with the depth of field or special angles designed to convey the puzzled state of the characters can qualitatively improve the essentially weak plot. There is barely any intrigue.
There’s nothing good to say about the performers, either, as these clumsy victims of the experiment look so faded, shamelessly compared to ordinary laboratory rodents.
It seems as if these unfortunates have found themselves in the ominous «Hive» of the Umbrella Corporation (a useless fire axe even appears in the frame), only instead of white symbolic rabbits, there are mice and a monster can jump out from around the corner only in a dream. Pollyanna Mackintosh, who could be seen in the recent «The Walking Dead», but its presence was criminally small.
In the 80s, the characters of a famous horror story fell asleep. A rabid maniac with burnt skin in a dirty sweater impaled the poor people with blades on a hellish gauntlet, which eventually gave rise to a whole cult. Modern «Double Blind», despite the identical option for characters — never sleep, will be perfectly fine with a good sleeping pill themselves. So have a nice night’s sleep.