Review of Ian Hunt-Duffy’s film “Claustrophobes. Insomnia”

Ian Hunt-Duffy’s film “Claustrophobes” is released. Insomnia” (Double Blind). An Irish thriller about the savage underbelly of the everyday practices of pharmaceutical companies inspired Mikhail Trofimenkov not fear, but such boredom that, unlike the sleepless victims of monopolies, he was dying to sleep.

Even before the opening credits, a ruthless gloved hand removes a white laboratory mouse from its cage: so cute, tail, antennae, pink nose. Once, the mouse’s head is cut off by a mini-guillotine. After this, you don’t even have to watch the film at all. The essence of the upcoming story is formulated in the best possible way.

Seven young people agree to become just such experimental mice for a pharmaceutical company with the ominous and hardly typical name for an industry that declares its humanism, “Blackwood”: this name alone should have alerted the “mice.” However, they were not alarmed, and, nestling in the sterile laboratory interiors, they began to absorb mysterious pills.

Purely theoretically, if the filmmakers depict a certain closed community, for each of its members there should be at least one bright color. But Ian Hunt-Duffy’s colors are not that dull: there are simply not enough of them for all the main characters.

Claire (Millie Brady) is a sort of homeless woman who is jealous of the lab mice who at least have shelter and food. She would like to spend part of the unimaginable thirty thousand euros promised as a bonus for participating in the experiment on rented housing, and waste the rest.

Alison (Abby Fitz) is a chatterbox and laugher who tries to “get on the tail” of her roommate Claire. Body-positive Vanessa grew up in a sectarian family and therefore does not believe in God. Amir (Akshay Kumar) received some kind of medical education. Another guy dreams of using the bonus he received to go to India and dissolve in prana. There is simply nothing to say about the other two participants in the experiment.

And with these colorless or simply faceless people, the audience will have to spend an hour and a half locked up. It’s time to become infected with claustrophobia, unless insomnia overcomes it.

The test is all the more painful because all the script moves are obvious long before the authors film the next chapter from the hypothetical textbook “How to make a horror film without scaring anyone.”

Initially, it is clear that the pills that Dr. Burg (Pollyanna McIntosh) gives his clients are, to put it mildly, far from safe. The fact that they deprive the “mice” of sleep is not so bad. Their immune system goes haywire, and their brain begins to resemble either a burned-out computer or a car with its engine on fire. And you can’t stay awake, and falling asleep is deadly.

Guys, why are you actually surprised? Are you unfamiliar with conspiracy theories? Haven’t you read from sworn conspiracy theorists that all this “big pharma” is concerned, albeit with a goal unknown to either science or common sense, only with the reduction of the human race?

In the same way, it is initially clear that among the experimental individuals there is a sent Cossack. Well, maybe not completely sent, but his colleagues in misfortune will consider him as such. And, of course, they were subjected to a terrible execution. As old as time, this is a description of a closed community, in search of a scapegoat, indulging in self-destruction. People have long understood that a person is angry: is it possible to tell the audience something new?

Even the touching old-fashioned special effects don’t break up the film’s tedium. Blood pouring from the nose, ears and eyes of the victims of the experiment. Foaming at the mouth and epileptic convulsions. Some kind of black portals flickering in sleepless delirium. The pin on the self-closing door to the laboratory, piercing Dr. Burg’s stomach.

In general, I don’t feel sorry for anyone, no one. Perhaps the same mouse from the prologue, and even that one is somehow not very good.