“Claustrophobes: Insomnia”: Irish horror quest
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In the Russian box office – “Claustrophobes: Insomnia”, a horror film originally from Ireland, devoid, however, of national flavor and any originality, but nevertheless worthy of watching for bedtime.
Seven strangers sign an agreement with a pharmaceutical company, agreeing to test a new drug on themselves. I remember that this is how Robert Rodriguez made money for his first film, but the heroes of “Claustrophobes”, who gathered in the laboratory, decided to become guinea pigs not out of love for art and are clearly not going to make any films. However, whatever their plans for the future, they are hardly destined to bring them to life: very soon it becomes clear that everything that happens to them is, at best, horror, if not snuff. The test subjects first stop sleeping, and when they still can’t stand it, they find themselves victims of their own nightmares. In addition, the entire staff disappears from the laboratory without a trace, and when the exhausted seven try to escape, a siren blares in the corridors, locks rattle – and the closed space surrounding the heroes becomes closed in the most literal sense of the word.
Most of the notable Irish horror films of recent times are in one way or another implicated in local realities, be it the rich, glorious Irish folklore, not only about leprechauns (“Out of the Darkness” by Corin Hardy, “The Other” by Lee Cronin, “To Hell” by Chris Bough), national stereotypes like unbridled drunkenness (“Grabbers” by John Wright) or simply unique landscapes, be it forest thickets or the suburbs of Dublin (“Releasing Fear” by Richard Waters, “The Grudge: Fright Night” by Kate Dolan). Compared to them, Ian Hunt-Duffy’s feature debut looks defiantly without any memory of kinship: the origins of the film can be learned only from the logos of the production companies in the opening credits, there is not a single redhead among the test subjects, and exactly the same experiment can be easily imagined even in the scenery California, even in the Philippines, and even on board the International Space Station. This impersonality gives what is happening a peculiar charm of a pure scheme, but at the same time makes it impossible to find at least some difference between the newly-minted “Claustrophobes” and a dozen other films tailored according to the same patterns.
But in general, the experiment can be considered successful. Even though the main focus here is on the characters’ waking lives, and the nightmares that drive them to the grave are shown only in fleeting, albeit rather effective, episodes, and therefore at some point it begins to seem that you are watching the third episode of A Nightmare on Elm Street, from which all the scenes with Freddy were cut. Although, of course, the inhabitants of the psychiatric clinic in the city of Springwood themselves, without Kruger, looked more interesting than the current experimental subjects – it is also unfortunate to note that the viewer has almost no chance of distinguishing the characters from each other, so one has to rely on formal signs like gender or hairstyle . As for the truly unexpected moments, one cannot help but note the amazingly accurate and penetrating use of the melody of the song “Peddlers”, known to the world from the Tetris intro: a few notes sung in a trembling voice make you shiver.
In the original, the Hunt-Duffy film is called “Double Blind” (that is, a “double-blind study” in which not only the subjects, but also the experimenters do not know to the very end what kind of influence the participants are exposed to), but in the domestic box office it, of course, acquired a title that combined elements painfully familiar to horror consumers. Today, this is already the seventh film in Russian box office with the word “Claustrophobes” in the title and the third with “Insomnia,” but they still haven’t come together. And in this case, it seems that just for this film – as if suspended in the space between a quest for survival and oneiric horror – the name-transformer turned out to be absolutely appropriate. And comprehensive.
In theaters from March 7
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