Session 9 is a low budget supernatural thriller about a group of asbestos removal engineers who get a contract to clear out an old insane asylum. The story was written with an actual place in mind, the Danvers State Insane Asylum and it was shot entirely on location here. As such, the building plays as much a part as any of the characters do.

Overall, this isn’t a bad little film. It’s certainly creepy and well played but the story does feel like it’s meandering a bit and doesn’t necessarily deliver the pay-off that it was building up towards. In fact, as much as I hate to admit to wanting what could be a clichéd ending, I do feel that they could have drawn the last act out a bit more and built even more suspense. As it is, it does feel like it ends a bit suddenly.

There’s more to it than that. For some reason it didn’t scare me and I don’t know whether it’s because I was in one of those moods or because it wasn’t that scary. (Okay, I tend not to get scared that easily but there was not even any sense of anticipation or anxiety). If I were to try to pinpoint it, I might suggest the screenplay which was too full of red herrings. It’s an often bemoaned thing but foreshadowing is a useful dramatic tool that can be overused.

It becomes easy in a film to watch for the seemingly random elaboration on some tool, device or skill that will be outstandingly helpful or hindering later (think the scene in What Lies Beneath where Michelle Pfeiffer tries to make a call on her cell phone while going over the bridge early on and Harrison Ford says “Honey! You know you can’t get a signal until you’re half way over the bridge.” You just know that she’s going to be desperately trying to do the same thing in the final act later on and, sure enough, she does!) The problem is that it’s a useful tool and also means that you’re less likely to avoid confusing or pissing off the audience later on with what seems like a random object or skill just turning up conveniently. A film like Shaun of the Dead makes this work very well: we actually see the gun in the Winchester and there’s a discussion about it early on in the film but it flows naturally and a big deal isn’t made out of it. Later on we see the gun in use but it’s done so well that it defies expectation even if we did see it coming.

What Session 9 did was throw a lot of these little random tidbits at you but a lot of them didn’t have a payoff. If you’d asked me before watching it then I’d have said that this was probably a good thing because it misleads an otherwise savvy and expectant audience. However, now I’m of the opinion that as this was wasted script that could have been used to build more of the suspense in the main plot or subplots.

But I also found that the direction needed to be a little more tight and focussed. In a discussion with a friend recently, I suggested that a film like Blair Witch suffered because there was no tension. Rather than lots of cinema verité shaking the camera around with wild abandon, there’s a lot to be said for sticking the camera on a tripod and having a static shot in which something may, or may not, happen. Tension build up? Oh yes. See The Exorcist III for a superlative implementation of this (I’m thinking the scene at night in the asylum.)

There’s one other thing that I found distracting about the film and that was the soundtrack. There was an annoying incidental piece of piano that kept playing and which I found displaced me from immersion in the film because it was so noticeable and so jarring.

However, much kudos for being a film about psychological horrorr rather than cheap shocks, gore and death-by-numbers affair. The two leads, played ably by David Caruso and Peter Mullan (who I’ve been confusing forever with Peter Cullen who did the voice of Optimus Prime in Transformers but is, in fact, a very fine Scottish actor who I’ve raved about before) add much needed gravitas to the film and add just what the film needs to make it a believable drama. It is good story and it is very much a character piece, albeit quite creepy and more than a little unsettling.