Bane, 2008
*This review will contain out-in-the-open spoilers, including the end of the film*
Four women---Katherine (Sophia Dawnay), Jane (Lisa Devlin), Natasha (Tina Barnes), and Elaine (Sylvia Robson)--have been abducted into a strange underground facility. Their memories erased, they suffer relentless interrogation and torture at the hands of a doctor named Murdoch (Daniel Jordan) and a mysterious man (Jonathan Sidgwick). At night, they are terrorized by a masked surgeon (Sam Smith, no not that Sam Smith).
For maybe the first 20 or so minutes, I thought, "Man, maybe I was too hard on this film." I haven't seen this movie in about 10 years, and I tend to be pretty generous when scoring films that are obviously low-budget affairs. It is rare for me to score independent films--especially those that seem to be trying--less than a 5. But as the film went on, it became pretty clear to me why this one ended up on my crud list.
Going back to what I wrote about
Candy and
Airplane Mode, infamy to my mind has something to do with a gap that exists between what a movie could have been or wants to be and what it actually is. That space between expectation and reality is, for me, what makes something frustrating.
So
Bane.
This is a film that raises some interesting questions, only for the answers to be either completely obvious and stupid or incredibly frustrating and nonsensical. Anyone who has ever seen a single dang film in their lives would easily guess that one of the women is somehow involved in what is happening. The film even weirdly tries to lampshade this by having Natasha be oddly instantly suspicious that Jane is part of it all.
The longer the film goes on, the more the torture and torment feels random, and the twist at the end that it was basically all random just to generate fear is the kind of "answer" that makes me incredibly annoyed as a viewer. It's the kind of plot element that allows a writing team to just sit around coming up with random stuff. I'm not saying that some of the situations aren't kind of creepy. Natasha waking up and finding that her kidney is gone is icky, and a scene where Jane either remembers or dreams being confined in a tiny cage while surrounded by hostile men is adequately claustrophobic and awful. But something about the pace of the movie never gets the tension and fear to build in the right way. It's all stop and go, with little or no new understanding to keep you engaged.
One thing I can compliment the film on is the lack of sexual exploitation in the film. It's pretty rare to find a film where a woman hostage isn't a victim of rape or attempted rape, and I appreciate that this film doesn't go there. On one hand, given what we ultimately learn about the objectives of their torturers, this actually seems like something that would have happened. But on the other hand I think that including such content would have veered the film into unwatchable territory for me.
What really irked me, ultimately, about this film is the combination of where we end up and just how long it takes to get there. I paused the film at one point when I was getting antsy, only to discover there was still an hour of runtime left. How? Why?! Why is this film so long. When I think back to what happens in it, I can't account for the 100 minutes. And the final scenes? Just really not a fan. Everything feels clunky, from the fact that a character has a literal exposition video to show a character to the declaration at the end that love was what saved everyone. I'm sorry, but maybe you are not watching the same movie I'm watching. That wasn't love, sweetheart, it was guilt. Not quite the same thing. It's the kind of finale that raises a lot of questions, many of which make you reflect more negatively on the content that came before. (My main question: can anyone explain how the surgeon was able to stab such neat numbers into their bodies? Was this guy a pointilist painter in a former life?)
There are some not-terrible ideas here, but there are way too many of them and they are explored in a way that is a huge let-down. The nerve of this film being two hours long.