Review of Session 9 (2001) by Christopher C — 06 Oct 2011

This movie gets inside your head and rattles you from the inside out. It moves a little slowly, but it's so insidiously creepy that it's easily worth it. One of the best horror movies out there. It's about an asbestos removal team that goes into an abandoned, condemned insane aslyum to clean it out, and one of the guys finds a set of reel-to-reel audio tapes in the basement of memory retrieval therapy sessions Mary Hobbes had with her psychologist decades before. What's even creepier though, is that one of the guys on the team has the same sort of memory repression problems. Pair that with each guy's past and the haunting, oppressive presence of the hospital itself and you have a recipe for some bad, tragic and scary stuff.

I care about every single character in this film: Phil, the crabby guy who has to work with the assclown that stole his girlfriend, Mike, the overqualified almost-lawyer who jumps at any opportunity to stimulate his mind, Hank, the irresponsible jackass that Phil's itching to fire, Jeff, the nyctophobic kid hired by his uncle that's just trying to not screw up and Gordo, the mentally fragile boss whose wife won't talk to him for reasons he can't understand. I love all five guys; you get to see the best and worst of them, thier pettiness, thier senses of humour, the group's cohesion, how long they've worked together and you become really invested in the crew so much so that it's harrowing if they even fight. The looming mental hospital adds another dimension of suffering and madness that brings out the worst in everyone: tempers, paranoia, fears, worries. There are a number of ways to interpret what ends up happening to the men in this film. At the end of it all though, each viewer needs to decide for themself who Simon is.

Simply put, this is my absolute favorite horror film, and I've seen a hell of a lot. If you missed this one, seek it out, see it, and tell me about it. You won't be sorry at all. Session 9 is utterly sublime.