Review of The Subjects (2015) by Harry W — 08 Sep 2015

Serving as an independent Australian film looking at superheroes, The Subjects sounded like an interesting experimental film.

To criticize The Subjects is like criticizing the artwork a child provides to their father. The creators of The Subjects only wanted to make something and to make audiences happy, regardless of the limitations they face. That's the case with The Subjects because the film really has the best intentions, though it has many things standing in the way of truly great execution. For me, I enjoyed the film for what it was and held it to the low standard of production that it ultimately rested on as a feature-length debut from Robert Mond with such a low budget. Alas, my fidelity to the critical community leaves me condemned to admit that I did not consider the film to be great.

Clearly a very low-budget film, The Subjects uses its script to cleverly get away with its limited amount of settings. In actual fact, the notion that the entire film takes place in one room keeps it simple and makes the narrative focus more clear. Unfortunately, the genuine production values do not give it any boost of credibility. The cinematography in the film feels really amateur as the angles seem very basic without emphasizing the details of the actors and therefore failing to support the characters as they should, as well as the fact that the minimalist use of editing ensures that the limited talents of the actors are dealt at viewers for extensive periods of time. The best technical element for me was the musical score because it was clearly a passionate piece for everyone involved, and it manages to prove subtle at the right moments and more climactic at others which balance a strong level of atmosphere across the many moods of the scenes.

But most notable is that the visual effects in the film are very clearly animated. The quality of the visual effects is clearly minimal, and what this reflects is the determining factor on if the viewer will actively enjoy the film. For me, I enjoyed it in parts and made an effort to look past the cheesy visual effects for the sake of their narrative relevance, but I could not deny that the low-budget nature of the experience was all too clear to me. Still, I was more bothered by the lack of sustainable writing.

I got intrigued by scenes in The Subjects which showed an agressive conflict development between the characters as they confronted their claustrophobia in the face of their powers, as well as the fact that the film was very much unpredictable as it experimented with conventions fairly well. But what hat really made me lose sense of the film was the lack of consistent plot coherence. Though there is not much of a plot in the film as it rests more on concept and character than genuine content, I felt there was not enough internal logic to support a lot of the narrative. One of the twists in the story comes from when we find out near the end that Corey has known his powers all along to be the ability to manipulate matter by creating or destroying it. Yet even though this is his determined ability, he explains that he was able to teleport an entire room to another part of the world without affecting its structural integrity or technological functioning. That has nothing to do with matter deconstruction or reconstruction and just seems strange. At the same time, Nikki is depicted as a girl who can change the colour of things but gradually finds the ability to melt. Either way, there is a lack of consistency in the writing which is a problem in a film where the budget is so limited that the writing is the backbone of everything. Unfortunately, it is all too clear that the dialogue in The Subjects is written because no cast member in the film is able to deliver it organically. Some of the characters are heavily stereotypical such as the aggressive British criminal Giggles or the distinctive American white girl Jenna who is particularly annoying as she is the artificial embodiment of every woman in reality TV today who are already artificial enough themselves. Others are just rip-offs of other film-established characters such as Spencer McLaren's ridiculous portrayal Devin as a Clark Kent figure or even more hilariously Paul Henri as essentially every Matthew McConaughey character ever. His voice articulation is oddly spot on in capturing that exact kind of character, and that added a touch of humour to the film.

The humour kept pushing to the point that it got to a ridiculous level. The story is ridiculous enough as it is without cramming itself full of so many attempts at humour, but there is a sporadic rate of success among them. Most of them come from the ridiculously over the top performance of Frank Magree whose heavily stereotypical portrayal of a Jason Statham archetype proves to stand out as a fish out of water when surrounded by so many others who attempt to maintain a facade of sophistication. Frank Magree may be left with repetitive and stereotypical material, but his dedication to driving everything in the film completely over the top fuels him with comic spirit and even dramatic grit at times which proves to be an entertaining gimmick when surrounded by the artificial attempts at melodrama delivered by essentially everyone else. He may not be perfect, but the heavily stereotypical demeanour that he delivered did effectively leave me entertained by his effort at enough times for me to constitute his presence as being genial.

So The Subjects has the best intentions and some thought provoking concepts, but its amateur nature is made all too clear by the limited production values, overly simplistic treatment of its concepts and characters whose artificiality is made all too clear by the dialogue and the performances from cast members who lack the gimmicks supplied by Frank Magree and Paul Henri.