Session 9 (2001) - Review
These past few months, I’ve been more interested in watching movies I already knew I loved instead of venturing down the streaming rabbit hole and watching something new. However, I finally decided to see what I could find on Netflix that I hadn’t already seen and I stumbled onto Session 9 from 2001. It came recommended as a small, cheap, and simple horror movie that does more than you expect of it. At just about 90 minutes, I didn’t feel like there was much to lose.
Pros
Pacing of the movie works to its benefit
Good setting and creepy moments
Cheap look gives the movie more character
Cons
Acting and writing can be pretty rough at times
Ending and the overall plot kind of comes out of nowhere
Plot & Thoughts
Gordon (Peter Mullan) and Phil (David Caruso) run an asbestos abatement company in the New England area and are hired to remove asbestos from a massive facility that used to be an asylum. They bring on a few other members of the team to speed up the process and hopefully get the project done in a short amount of time to earn a big bonus. Gordon is a bit stressed out about his life at the moment and everyone else has their own baggage to deal with it seems. Mike (Steven Gevedon), the lawyer in training of the group, discovers some audio tapes of a former mental patient and decides to listen to them in his spare time. Members of the team go missing and soon everyone is freaking out about something.
The premise is simple, but effective. The cast is small, but capable. The budget is cheap, but charming. Session 9 has a lot of things that make up for its shortcomings. However, it also has a few glaring issues that prevented me from enjoying it in the end.
The experience reminds me of It Comes at Night, albeit a slightly less polarizing and infuriating one. There are a lot of things that work and are creepy in their own right. However, what the movie ultimately chooses to be about degrades the experience. Essentially, the ending with the odd and unnecessary twist changes the point of the film and the focus. It comes out of nowhere, doesn’t really justify anything that happened leading up to it, and just kills the mood. It would have been better off as a ghost story or something to that effect.
I assume the low budget of the film had something to do with the ambitions behind it as well as the ending. There are plenty of examples in which the dialogue and the events that take place in a scene are vague enough to have been shot for the purpose of being able to spin the story on a dime if necessary. The subplot surrounding Gordon and his relationship with his wife is extremely vague up until the end when everything is revealed. However, if you change the ending, you could very easily change what his life was like at home because we never saw anything explicit there. Perhaps they ran out of money and couldn’t tell the story they wanted. Perhaps they didn’t know what story they wanted to tell. Regardless, the result is not to the film’s benefit.
It’s a shame because, for the first half, I was onboard. It moved at a slower pace, without becoming dull. It slowly gathered tension and it worked. Sure, there were some moments where the acting was a bit subpar. There were also some spots where the dialogue was stupid or incoherent. However, if it wasn’t for the ending, I’d be more willing to recommend it as a good cheap horror film.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Session 9 earns a great deal of good will throughout most of its runtime. There are some good creepy moments among the beautiful derelict scenery to make up for the occasionally weak acting and writing. It’s too bad it squanders a great deal of that good will with an ending that seems rushed and is ultimately uninteresting.
