Irish horror movies have a tendency to be inventive, ingenious and out there, and Double Blind ticks all those boxes. I told a mate I was watching an Irish horror movie and he wondered what categorised a horror movie as Irish. “Is it,” he ventured, “killer potatoes?”
No, Mark, no. Like 2012’s massively underrated Stitches, or The Canal, or (for the more comedically inclined) Grabbers, this is a horror movie made in Ireland, written and directed by Irish talent, with a few Irish actors in the cast, though the lead role in this case (as in Stitches and The Canal) goes to a Brit, Millie Brady, who plays a young woman called Claire who’s signed up to a drugs trial in a clinical facility.
Along with six other guinea pigs – four lads, three lasses in total – they are to be injected with a mystery substance in a “double blind” trial, which means neither the person receiving the drug nor the person administering it knows what the substance is. That way external bias, psychosomatic effects, prejudices, bribes etc, can be headed off at the pass.
Of course it all goes wrong, or else there’d be no film. Within a short time there are strange side effects. Vomiting. No one can sleep. Dr Burke (Pollyanna McIntosh), the white-coated scientist running the trial, is having urgent whispered conversations on the phone with head office, who urge her to keep on. The suits even come up with a special inducement – a bonus of €30,000 to each person who sticks it out to the finish.
Well if that isn’t a red flag, who knows what would constitute one, but the seven lab rats have all been chosen, they only later realise, because this sort of flag is one they might not respond to. None of them is particularly well connected socially in the outside world, and they could all do with the money, for various reasons. So, yes, they all accept.
Without spilling any more beans, this is where the real trouble starts. An unpleasant death is visited on one of the testees, who dies with blood pouring from eyes, nose and mouth, in the first of a series of challenges to the make-up department, which they rise to epically. The splatter in this movie is convincingly ugly and someone has spent time forensically charting the various colours and textures blood takes on as it dries and coagulates.
Usefully, for a debut film made on a low budget, it all takes place in this one clinical facility (ie a studio), but Dublin-based director Ian Hunt-Duffy makes it a dynamic and disorienting affair thanks to a subjective camera (by DP Narayan Van Maele) suggesting states of wonky paranoia as days of sleeplessness, accompanied by mood swings, abrupt changes in character and bouts of hallucination, take hold.
Never mind the mystery drug is the idea, the real danger comes from other people in this “huis clos”, as Sartre termed it, where “hell is other people”. Italian master of the macabre Dario Argento is in there too, in the dizzy and unsettling atmospherics reinforced by the synth-heavy doomily intoning soundtrack by Die Hexen (about whom I know nothing apart from the fact they are very effective).
Through this abundance of blood, camera gymnastics and gothic music, the actors somehow prevail. Or some do, anyway. Brady is good as the cool, cynical, slightly damaged “normal person” through whose eyes we watch events. Abby Fitz also stands out as Alison, the endlessly talking, highly strung but very likeable fellow trial participant. As for the rest, Akshay Kumar, Diarmuid Noyes and Brenock O’Connor have their moments, Frank Blake and Shonagh Marie a bit less so, because Darach McGarrigle’s screenplay isn’t that interested in them.
If you see Kate Ashfield’s name in the credits (I’m looking at it now on the IMDb) and are wondering if she brings a bit of Shaun of the Dead-ness to proceedings, I cannot say. I couldn’t see her. She was playing Claire’s mother, on the other end of a phone call with a daughter trying to reconcile with the mother who, it’s suggested, neglected (at best) or abused (at worst) her. She never appears on screen.
A good film. Moody, jangly, one for lovers of wet, viscous crimson-hued horror. Not a potato in sight.
Double Blind – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
